PREFACE

Although forty years have passed since the death of Willa Cather in 1947, she never has been the subject of a full-length biography. When she died, her reputation was firmly established as one of the most significant American novelists, and during the succeeding decades her stature has continued to grow. At the time of her death J. Donald Adams wrote in the New York Times that "no American novelist was more purely an artist," and George Whicher declared four years later that "no American writer . . . can be more certain than she to capture ultimately the admiration of posterity." The absence of a detailed biography is probably due to the traps, pitfalls, and barricades she placed in the biographer's path, and until now sufficient material has not been available to flesh out more than a medium-length life. While no biography ever can be definitive, this study contains a great deal more material than any previous one and goes considerably beyond my own earlier biography, as well as the efforts of others, in presenting a life-size portrait of this remarkable woman.

When E.K. Brown's biography of Cather appeared in 1953, Alfred Knopf wrote on the jacket: "Here is all the biographical information anyone is likely ever to gather about Willa Cather." Even though he was understandably interested in promoting the sale of Brown's book, he no doubt also thought Cather had been such a private person that biographical data actually was meager. He was wrong, of course, and since Cather died there has been a steady accumulation of material to fuel the ever-growing interest in her life and work. Hundreds of pages of Cather's journalistic writings have been dug from the dusty magazine and newspaper files where they first appeared and republished. All of her stories have been collected, including many she gladly would have expunged from the record if she could have. She left a trail of published interviews and speeches and public statements that surprises anyone who knows only her own pronouncements desiring privacy. Perhaps fifteen hundred of her letters by now have found their way into institutional collections from Maine to California, even though she and Edith Lewis destroyed as many of her letters as they could lay their hands on. Fortunately, correspondents who outlived her had the good sense to realize that Cather belongs to the world and her letters ought to be preserved. It is still impossible to publish or quote from her letters (her will forbids it), but they are available for consultation, and the information they contain is public property.

Knopf tried his best to preserve Cather's privacy, but it was difficult. He said himself at the time of the centennial celebration of her birth in 1973 that "anyone who abhors contact with members of the public is best advised not to produce work which has public interest." Cather resented the fact that she could not sit on a bench in Central Park without being recognized and accosted by strangers, but all her efforts to keep out of the limelight arid control access to her life have been unsuccessful in keeping biographers off her trail. She certainly made the task of writing her life more difficult; yet she and other writers who have wanted to cover their tracks always have been doomed to failure. Still, one envies the chroniclers of those public figures who carefully saved for posterity the documentation of their lives.

The problems that the biographer of Cather has to face, however, are more complicated than merely locating the raw materials for the life. She threw up roadblocks, consciously and unconsciously, to frustrate pursuit. During her own lifetime she managed her image rather successfully by writing biographical sketches of herself and telling interviewers what she wanted printed about her. She changed her birth date; she altered details of her life; she exaggerated many events; she revised her opinions. She made no effort to be accurate in recalling facts, and it is hard sometimes to tell where the reality leaves off and the fiction begins. The biographer continually has to separate the fact from the fantasy, and he never can be sure he has succeeded completely. To make matters still more difficult, Lewis's memoir of her friend also tries to manage the image, and one has to use her data with caution.

If he can successfully negotiate the minefields, the biographer of Cather has a great deal of autobiographical fiction to help in his task. She turned her own life and experiences into literature to a degree uncommon among writers. I have used many passages from her fiction to document her life, keeping in mind constantly the need for caution. There are, fortunately, enough letters and contemporary documents, such as interviews and reminiscences of friends, to corroborate many events in her life that have passed through the crucible of her imagination to emerge in her stories and novels. My notes make it clear when I am working from letters and when I am drawing on her fiction.

Sir Isaac Newton in a letter to his rival scientist Robert Hooke wrote in 1676 that "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." I feel somewhat the same in writing Cather's biography four decades after her death. I have built on the work of many scholars, as my notes will indicate, and without their pioneering this book could not have been written. Mildred Bennett, the first of the Cather scholars, wrote an invaluable study of places and people important in Cather's work in The World of Willa Cather (1951). She was on the scene in Red Cloud and able to interview old friends and relatives. Lewis's memoir, which was prepared for the use of E. K. Brown, is, of course, of immense assistance, as it was the work of a friend of more than forty years. Brown's biography is the pioneering life, and when he died before completing his book, the very able Leon Edel finished it for him. Bernice Slote at the University of Nebraska was indefatigable in recovering and organizing Cather's fugitive essays, editing her poems and stories, and writing about her. Virginia Faulkner and the University of Nebraska Press carried out a large publishing venture in making Cather's early work available, and William Curtin, editor of The World and the Parish, two volumes of Cather's journalistic writings, is the benefactor of all Cather scholars. Elizabeth Sergeant's memoir of her long friendship with Cather is another important contribution to Cather studies, as are the reminiscences of Ferris Greenslet, Alfred Knopf, and many others who knew her.

I came to my interest in Cather in 1967 or 1968 when I was invited to contribute a brief critical biography to a series brought out by the nowdefunct publisher Pegasus. My book, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, appeared in 1970 and was based on much primary material that had not been available to Brown. I was able to correct errors and add details, but my record was far from complete, and it also contained its own errors. I never planned to write another biography of Cather, but after the death in 1983 of Bernice Slote, who had spent nearly a lifetime gathering material for the definitive biography, I decided to return to the project, and I have been able to use her papers.

My present view of Cather does not change in any basic way the image of her contained in my earlier book. I have found no skeletons in the closet or sensational data to titillate the reader. There are, however, hundreds of new details, much fuller accounts of events in her life, new and expanded critical examinations of her works, and details of her reception. I have tried hard to get all the facts right. I have changed many of my opinions about her life and work over the past twenty years, and these are reflected in the portrait that emerges. I also have dealt with the issues of lesbianism and sexual orientation, which interest many contemporary readers, and taken into account recent feminist criticism. I have gone into her personality, beliefs, prejudices, aspirations, loves, and hates in considerable detail. In the past two decades a large and impressive body of criticism has grown up about Cather's fiction, and any biography that ignores this work cannot lay claim to much significance.

The person who moves through these pages is an extraordinarily gifted woman. From her Virginia childhood and Nebraska adolescence she made her way through the world with energy and dedication. She went from college journalism to professional journalism, then to magazine writing and editing, pushing steadily towards her artistic objective. Her progress was slow, however, and she did not publish her first novel until she was thirty-eight. The official face she presented to the public in her collected works was only the one-tenth of the iceberg that appears above the surface, for when she reached the top of her profession, she wanted the apprentice work forgotten. It is the task of the biographer, however, to search among the shards to discover the abandoned designs and the crudities later perfected. The themes and subjects that she treated so luminously in her mature work all appeared in her earliest efforts. She was a Romantic and a primitive from the start, but it was not until she was in her forties that she was able to utilize effectively her own experiences to weave the myths of the American past into the magical fabric of her best fiction. There was much trial and error in her apprenticeship, but the outlines were all present by the time she was twenty.

Although Cather wrote an old friend in 1945 that she never had been very ambitious, the truth was just the opposite. Her career down to the publication of O Pioneers!, her first important novel, reveals a very eager young woman from the provinces determined to make good. She did what she had to do to make a living and was not above writing potboilers and doing hackwork. Yet she had all the while a single-minded dedication to the pursuit of art. During the years of struggle, moreover, her attachment to family, old friends, and home remained strong, and after settling permanently in the East, she returned to Lincoln and Red Cloud frequently to renew her sources. Her feeling for Nebraska, however, was ambivalent until she had been away for about fifteen years; then the post-pioneer period of her childhood became the epic material of her romances and led her still deeper into the past. She went through a period in the twenties when she felt alienated from American life but produced her greatest novels in that era. In the thirties she lived a very private life and continued to write well but with diminishing vitality.

Her old age is not sad, like the blackness of Mark Twain's final pessimism, though her health began to break down in her last years. She hated many things about the world that rotated outside her self-imposed isolation in the forties, but she did not become embittered at the end. She had achieved most of the things she wanted from life and knew that her career had been a success. She did not have to write, as Howells did to James, that she had become a dead cult with her statues cut down and grass growing over them in the moonlight. Her literary reputation was secure, and that was what really mattered.

The critics usually have treated Cather very well, though she often thought otherwise. From H. L. Mencken's delighted discovery of her first novels to the latest international bibliography published by the Modern Language Association, she has been regarded as an important writer. And people have continued reading her work, despite her strenuous efforts to keep her books from being dramatized, anthologized, and reprinted in inexpensive editions. A writer of lesser stature might well have consigned herself to oblivion by such tactics. I know of no other American writer of this century who is more likely to go on being read than Cather. The statement she made in her preface to the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett in 1925 is prophetic: "If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once: The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely." And the last of the three, she added, fairly shines with "the reflection of its long, joyous future." Of the best of Willa Cather, one could say the same.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the writing of this book I have received help from a great many individuals, to whom I wish to express my gratitude: to Margaret Anne O'Connor, who read and edited my manuscript, loaned me her collection of Cather reviews, and performed many acts of friendship; to Susan Rosowski, who also gave my manuscript a meticulous reading, the benefit of her impressive knowledge of Cather, and encouragement throughout the writing; to Mildred Bennett, who answered many queries; to Helen Cather Southwick, who loaned me letters, pictures, answered questions, and arranged for me to visit Cather's summer cottage on Grand Manan Island; to Reg Flagg and Kathleen Buckley, who talked to me and showed me about Grand Manan; to Charles Cather, who allowed me to have copies of certain letters; to Elaine Walker Hall, director of the Frederick County Historical Society at Winchester, Virginia, who secured information for me regarding Cather genealogy; to Doris Grumbach, who answered questions; to Patricia Lee Yongue, who let me see correspondence from Cather to Stephen Tennant; to Leon Edel, who answered queries; to David Stouck, who supplied some research materials, to Brent Bohlke, who let me use the manuscript copy of his collection of Cather interviews and speeches; to Mary Weddle, who loaned me letters written by Cather to Aunt Franc; to Harry Finestone, who gave me materials he had used for his dissertation; to John Broderick of the Library of Congress, who searched the Manuscript Division for Cather letters; to Cathy Henderson, Research Librarian at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, and Patience-Anne W. Lenk, Colby College Library, both of whom were helpful in my obtaining copies of letters.

I am also grateful to librarians and libraries at the following institutions which I visited in the course of collecting material for this book: Elizabeth Anne Falsey and the Houghton Library of Harvard University, Virginia Renner and the Huntington Library, Saundra Taylor and the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Barbara A. Paulson and the Morgan Library, Andrea I. Paul and the Nebraska State Historical Society Library, Joseph Svoboda and Elsie V. Thomas and the University of Nebraska Archives, Carolyn A. Sheehy and the Newberry Library, John A. Stinson and the New York Public Library, Connell Gallagher and the University of Vermont Library, Gregory Johnson and the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia Library, Ann Billesbach and the Willa Cather Historical Center at Red Cloud, David E. Schoonover and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Other libraries I want to thank for supplying me with photocopies of Cather letters: Allegheny College, Amherst College, the University of Arkansas, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Chicago Historical Society Library, Colby College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Enoch Pratt Free Library (Baltimore), Georgetown University, the University of Kentucky, Holy Cross College, Loyola University (New Orleans), Middlebury College, the Newark Public Library, the State University of New York (Binghamton), the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, Sweet Briar College, the University of Texas, the Virginia Baptist Historical Society (Richmond), Wellesley College, the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland), and the Wisconsin State Historical Society (Madison).

In addition, I wish to thank Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Houghton Mifflin for permission to quote from the Cather titles on which they hold copyright; William A. Koshland for supplying me with photos of Alfred Knopf and for permission to quote from Blanche Knopf's letters to Cather; the Lilly Library for permission to quote from S. S. McClure's letters to Cather; the Houghton Library of Harvard University for permission to quote from the letters of Ferris Greenslet to Cather.

My final debts are to the Research Committee of the University of California at Davis for grants that speeded and facilitated the preparation of this book; to Delfina Redfield for many kindnesses; to Diana Dulaney, who put the entire opus into the word processor, promptly, efficiently, enthusiastically; to Roberta Woodress, who has been a scholar's ideal companion for nearly half a century.

JAMES WOODRESS

PROLOGUE

Pittsburgh passengers waiting to board a train for Chicago at the Union Station one day in early April 1912 might have noticed among their ranks a handsome woman, perhaps even beautiful, whose bearing and composure suggested a person of some importance. Though she was no longer young, she had a sturdy build and a clear complexion. Her skin was off-white, perhaps creamy,"rather like the outside of any well-washed plate." Her rosy cheeks indicated boisterous good health. Weighing 125 pounds and standing five feet six, she had eyes of a distinct blue, and when she looked at one, her glance was open and direct. Her hair, what one could see under a large hat, was straight and dark brown, combed back simply and parted slightly offcenter. Her lashes were dark, her eyebrows strongly marked. Her other features were regular and pleasant to look at, her mouth was generous and good-humored, and her hands were broad and strong. She looked like a person used to getting things done, someone accustomed to giving orders; maybe she was, a rarity in those days, a successful business woman. The more observant passengers would have detected an air of keen anticipation in her manner as she stood with her luggage watching the train pull into the station.

This was Willa Cather, thirty-eight years old, recently managing editor of the spectacularly successful McClure's Magazine, on leave from her job, en route to Arizona to visit her brother, and at a critical juncture in her career. For nearly six years she had been editing, dealing with contributors, reading other people's manuscripts, curbing the half-baked impulses of her boss, Sam McClure. She had become one of the most important women editors in magazine journalism, but those six years had kept her marking time in her own literary career. A few months before, she finally had broken away from the grind of putting out a monthly magazine, taken a leave of absence, and gone to upstate New York for rest, recuperation, and writing. Now she was ready to strike out in a new direction, and as it turned out, she was never again to return to the office routine at McClure's. Although she had managed to write her first novel while she still worked for McClure, it was a novel she later wanted to disown. Although she also had published a few stories during those years, none did she ever think worth reprinting. The trip to the Southwest that began on a spring day in 1912 was to leave an indelible impression on her and to mark the turning point in her career. The successful magazine executive who left Pittsburgh that April morning returned the novelist that we know. The Pennsylvania, Burlington, and Santa Fe railroads, which carried her from Pennsylvania to Arizona, transported her from one life to another.

After changing trains in Chicago, she boarded the Burlington and headed west. As she crossed the Mississippi, she again experienced the tightness in her chest and a bit of the fright she had felt as a child when she was taken to Nebraska at the age of nine. The West always paralyzed her a little, she wrote, but when she was away from it, she remembered only the tang on the tongue. Though she had lived in the East a long time by 1912, she still had trouble letting herself go with the current when she reached the wide, rolling prairies of Nebraska. She felt like a person who could not swim when dropped into the water. There were just so many, many miles of the West. When she was a child growing up in Nebraska, she had been sure that she would never, get away and that she would die in a cornfield. Now that she had escaped, she no longer had that fear, though she still got attacks of fright. But after a few days in Red Cloud visiting her parents and old friends, she was ready to push on farther west, and she boarded another Burlington train, this time for Denver.

Colorado and the Rocky Mountains were familiar territory for her, as her oldest brother, Roscoe, lived in Wyoming and she had visited him on a number of occasions. Once she left Colorado, however, she was seeing new and exciting country. From Trinidad to Albuquerque the land was utterly splendid, she wrote. The Valley of the Rhone was nothing to it. All the way from Trinidad, Colorado, to Las Vegas, New Mexico, she wrote her good friend Elsie Sergeant, there was a continuous purple mountain that tuned one up. Albuquerque delighted her, though she stayed only a few days before continuing on to Arizona. There was a strong pull about the place, something Spanish in the air that teased one. She had known Mexicans during her Red Cloud adolescence, but Albuquerque far exceeded her expectations. Such color! The Lord had set the stage splendidly there. It was the most beautiful country she had seen anywhere, even more brilliant than the French Riviera. She caught sight of some of the most wonderful Indian villages, each one built close about its church, and there were abandoned villages, too, she marveled, that had been Spanish missions during the time of Queen Elizabeth. She wanted to return later with her brother Douglass for a longer visit.

On April 19 she arrived in Winslow, a little desert town on the Santa Fe where Douglass, who worked for the railroad, made his headquarters. He immediately began showing her about the pueblo towns and taking her to see ancient cliff dwellings nearby. They planned to visit an Indian snake dance and projected a trip to Old Mexico. How splendid this part of the world is, she wrote McClure. But then there was a letdown.

Douglass had to go off with his construction crew for three days, leaving Willa alone in his little eggshell of a house with his roommate, a brakeman named Tooker. Staying alone with Tooker, she wrote, was quite in accord with the proprieties of Winslow, but even Tooker had been off on his run for the past two nights, and then she had no protector except the drunken London cockney whom Douglass had picked up to do his cooking and housekeeping. He was no protection at all. She did not mind being left alone, however, because Tooker was a great bore. He read Emerson all the time, looked just like a character in William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide, and dressed the part. Life, she thought, was nothing but a poor imitation of art. Tooker was simply encrusted with information gleaned from millions of magazines, and though he was one of nature's noblemen with a square jaw and bold carriage, she did not know how long she could stand either his nobleness or his information. She was doing target practice with a pistol and might let drive at Tooker, she wrote. He never permitted himself an action in one syllable. He "arrived" and he "removed" his hat, and he "reflected" that when the wind blew it "retarded" his train. The cockney Englishman was great fun, but he was reeling drunk all the time and had to be sat upon and sent away. He once had worked in a stable in Paris and spoke a queer kind of fluent French, and when he was the drunkest, he always wept and began reciting the same sentimental verses.

When Cather looked about outside, she found that Winslow was an ugly little western town. It had been founded some thirty years before as a division point on the Santa Fe, and there was no one there but railroad people. The only excitement occurred when the trains stopped and passengers got off to eat at the Fred Harvey hotel, La Posada. Although the desert was very fine, one had to cross two miles of tin cans and old shoes to get to it. There were bright red sunsets, like brick dust, but the sandstorms were a terror and often stopped the trains. If she had arrived two months earlier, there would have been plenty of excitement, for on Valentine's Day 1912, President Taft in Washington had signed the proclamation admitting Arizona to the Union as the forty-eighth state. For the first time in history movie cameras had photographed a president signing a law, and when the news had been telegraphed to Arizona, there was wild celebrating everywhere. Whistles shrieked at mines, church bells rang, schools and businesses closed, and parades surged through the streets. Even William Jennings Bryan came west to make a two hour speech in the state capital at Phoenix.

Life was very quiet for the first two weeks. Then things began to happen so fast that she had no time to write letters. She did manage a postcard to Sergeant on May 12, reporting that she had caught step at last and was very happy. She had been on a trip with the local priest, Father Connolly, a friend of Douglass's, who had taken her to visit some of the missions. They had talked about the country and the people, and he had filled her full of Spanish and Indian legends. He was the first of many Catholic missionary priests she came to know in the Southwest, and like a sponge she soaked up the land, the people, and the culture for future use. Her letters from this trip west reveal an intoxicating sense of discovery. The Southwest became one of the passions of her life.

Even more exciting was the appearance one day of four Mexicans who came to serenade her: two section hands, a bartender who played divinely, and a boy of unearthly beauty who sang. The last reminded her of a statue she had seen in Naples of Antinous, who was loved and deified after his death by Emperor Hadrian. This boy was simply Antinous come to life. The Mexican trio returned night after night, and Cather was captivated by the singer, whose name turned out to be Julio (pronounced Hulio, she explained to Sergeant). Her letters for the next several months were filled with Julio. He was too beautiful to be true and utterly different from anyone she ever had met. He was from Vera Cruz, knew a great many Mexican and Spanish songs, and he was won-der-ful, she wrote Sergeant, as she enclosed the translation she had made of one of his songs. After singing to her nightly, Julio took her off to visit the Painted Desert, and it took her days to get over that expedition. Julio was without beginning and without end. He had a personal elegance, the like of which she had never known, and a grace of expression that simply caught one up. He wasn't soft and sunny like an Italian; he was indifferent and opaque. He had the long, strong upper lip seen in Aztec sculpture, somber eyes filled with lots of old trouble, and the pale yellow skin of very old gold and old races. Talking to him was like learning a new language because he spoke so directly. He would drive any number of miles to see flowers or running water, but she could not get him the least bit interested in the ancient cliff dwellers. Why, he said, raising his brows, was she interested in los muertos? We are living. It was fitting to say masses for the dead, but that was the end of it. Further attention was a waste of time. But he did tell her one memorable story of ancient times, the tale of an Aztec Cleopatra,"The Forty Lovers of the Queen." Cather wrote Sergeant that she must come to the Southwest, and if she did, she was sure to pick up a Mexican sweetheart, who would take as much time and strength as she would give him. Afterwards Sergeant remembered that when someone asked how Mabel Dodge could have married Tony Luhan, an Indian, Cather replied,"How could she help it?"

Cather never found occasion in her later career to put Julio into a novel, unless there is a bit of him in Spanish Johnny in The Song of the Lark, but she remembered the story of the Aztec Cleopatra. At the time she heard it, she said she was going to write it up when she visited the place where it happened, but she never got to Old Mexico. She also thought she remembered reading the tale in Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, but Julio's account was much more alive. He never had read anything but prayer books and had no stale ideas, in fact not many ideas at all. The story, a brutal tale of forty secret lovers, each killed after the queen tired of them, appears in Cather's 1920 story "Coming, Aphrodite!" and is told by Don Hedger to Eden Bower the night he becomes her lover.

Also in May Julio took Cather to a Mexican dance, where she was the only Anglo-Saxon present. This dance may well have been the source for the Mexican dance scene in The Song of the Lark, for it made a strong impression. Such dancing! she wrote. There was in particular a curious pantomime waltz in which a man danced with two women, the prettiest dance she ever had seen. Cather's feeling in the novel for the natural grace of the Mexicans, their love of music are very much of a piece with her letters from this trip to the Southwest: "The Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and engaging, the men were graceful and courteous." There were no constraints of any kind but a kind of natural harmony about their movements.

But Cather had other things to do with her life than idle away the days with a beautiful Mexican boy, no matter how captivating he was. She finally severed what she called Julio's strong Egyptian fetters, went to Albuquerque, and then back to Nebraska. He was wonderful but could not take the place of a whole civilization. However, after returning to Red Cloud she wrote that she might still go back for Julio. He would look lovely in Boston at Mrs. Fields's house, but then Mrs. Isabella Gardner would sweep him up and take him to Fenway Court, which he would like better than her apartment. Earlier she had thought that she must get him to New York, where he could make an easy living as an artist's model. Artists would fight for him. In August, after returning to Pittsburgh, she was still talking about Julio, but after that he disappears from her letters completely.

In between outings with Julio, Cather had plenty to occupy her time. On Douglass's next three days off they went out with Tooker on daily excursions to nearby canyons: Clear Creek, Chevelon, and Jack's, all gorges carved by tributaries of the Little Colorado River. Those were lovely days with all the advantages of a camping trip and none of the disadvantages. They started off each morning with a wagon and light camping gear, canteens, coffee, bacon, fruit, cream, and so forth; and each night they returned to town, where they had hot baths and beds to sleep in. Cather had canvas shoes with red rubber soles that she had bought in Boston, and with them, she said, she could walk up a forty-five-degree rock surface. One day they went down a cliff for 150 feet, using handholds to descend. The experience was exhilarating. Tooker, a great bore in town, turned out to be a splendid companion on the trail. All his miserable information fell away, Cather wrote Sergeant, like a boy dropping his clothes to go swimming. The real Tooker, who had worked in the sheep camps and the mines, was strong, active, and resourceful. He was full of interesting stories, she found, once one got through the sediment deposited by the magazine articles. Tooker later turns up very sympathetically portrayed as Ray Kennedy, the brakeman, in The Song of the Lark.

These expeditions were a prelude to the Grand Canyon, where Cather went on May 16. She was properly impressed with this "wonder," and agreed it was indeed wonderful, but she thought that not even this marvel, which had only a geologic history, could be interesting for more than a limited time. But besides the great spectacle of the canyon, there was wonderful walking and riding, and one day she accompanied some English visitors down to the Halfway House in the canyon. It was an awful pull, she wrote, but she was always a good walker, and her climbs around Winslow had been good conditioning. She was pleased to find that the canyon was still completely unspoiled, not one shop. A visitor couldn't even buy an orange, and there was not one civilized amusement. It was still seven years before the Grand Canyon would become a national park. There were two hotels, however, one magnificent and one excellent, set down in the immense pine forest, and there were modest lodgings at Bright Angel Camp. She stayed at the last, which was comfortable, simple, and only cost her three dollars a day. It was the only reasonable place she could find. Everything was very expensive, and all the places one wanted to see were off the railroad. To get to them it was necessary to hire a horse for two-fifty a day or a team and open wagon for five dollars. The scenery was worth it, however, and she urged Sergeant to come and see for herself

As soon as she left the Grand Canyon, she retraced her steps to Flagstaff, where she met her brother. They were going to explore more cliff dwellings. Walnut Canyon, now a national monument, was only a few miles outside of Flagstaff, and there she could see a spectacular collection of some three hundred cliff dwellings about one thousand years old. These houses, which were built into the limestone walls of the canyon, had been abandoned probably because of a prolonged drought in the twelfth century. But they had remained largely intact, preserved by the dry desert air, as though in a time capsule, a silent, ghostly city. They are a smaller version of the cliff dwellings now protected within the boundaries of Mesa Verde National Park, which Cather visited three years later.

As she and Douglass drove by wagon out of Flagstaff, they could see the blue slopes and snowy summit of San Francisco Mountain to the north. They then entered the first great forest she had ever seen, magnificent stands of huge ponderosa pines spaced well apart. The wagon road dipped lower, falling away from the high plateau on which Flagstaff sat, and soon the forest closed behind them and the mountain disappeared. Then they left the forest, the sparse growth of pinon pine and scrub began, and the country broke into open, stony clearings. Finally they came to Walnut Canyon, called Panther Canyon in The Song of the Lark. It was "like a thousand others—one of those abrupt fissures with which the earth in the Southwest is riddled; so abrupt that you might walk over the edge of any one of them on a dark night and never know what had happened to you." The canyon walls for the first two hundred feet below the surface were perpendicular cliffs, striped with evenrunning strata of rock.

"From there on to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were shelving, and lightly fringed with piñons and dwarf cedars. The effect was that of a gentler canon within a wilder one. The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge began. There a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like a deep groove running along the sides of the canon. In this hollow (like a great fold in the rock) the Ancient People had built their houses of yellowish stone and mortar. The overhanging cliff above made a roof two hundred feet thick. The hard stratum below was like an everlasting floor. The houses stood along in a row, like the buildings in a city block, or like a barracks."

Although Cather's surviving letters do not report the visit to Walnut Canyon, she was deeply moved by the experience. In her first fictional setting in the Southwest her memories of Walnut Canyon inform an important section of The Song of the Lark, written three years later. The canyon is the scene of a pivotal decision in the career of Thea Kronborg, its protagonist. Thea leaves Chicago for Arizona to rest, recuperate, and think. She has been ill during the previous winter and needs the dry desert air of the Southwest. But more important, she needs to get "out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort." Ever since leaving home for Chicago to study music, she has always been a "little drudge" working to get on in the world and never having time to sort out her values or chart her future. But on the ranch she visits near Flagstaff "the personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her," and as she climbs into her big German feather bed the first night, she feels a complete sense of release from the struggles and anxieties of her former life. Day after day while she is at the ranch, which adjoins Panther Canyon, she takes her lunch basket and descends to one of the cliff houses, where she lies lazily in the sun high above the bottom of the canyon. All her life "she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up." Now it is as though she were waiting for something to catch up with her. At the end of her stay at Panther Canyon, Thea makes up her mind to go to Germany to continue her musical education. This is the turning point in her career. She finally knows what she wants out of life and goes on to become a great Wagnerian soprano.

The Song of the Lark is heavily autobiographical in its early books, as it details the life of the young singer-heroine. Cather herself was at a crossroads in her career when she went to the Southwest for the first time. She had been ill during the previous winter and needed the bracing air of Arizona and New Mexico. She too was tired and felt unfulfilled in her journalistic career. She too had been a little drudge hurrying from one task to another. Undecided about her future when she left the East, she was planning to return to McClure's Magazine as a staff writer, though she had resigned already as managing editor, but during her weeks in the Southwest she saw clearly that she had been frittering away her life in the editorial routine. It was time to get out completely. She gathered her courage and struck out in a new direction. This time of rest, recuperation, and thought gave her a clear vision of where she wanted to go in the future.

There is a difference, however, between Thea's decision, which is concentrated dramatically in the Panther Canyon episode, and Cather's, because life is often less dramatic than fiction. Cather's departure from the magazine was aided by a change in ownership and a shake-up in staff, but when she returned to New York, she felt obliged to give the magazine some of her time in the balance of 1912 and in 1913 before severing all connections. And she also had a good start on her rest and rehabilitation during the autumn of 1911 at Cherry Valley, New York, where she did some important writing. But the trip to the Southwest, nonetheless, was a watershed in her career.

After she visited Flagstaff, she returned to Winslow briefly; then she and her brother continued on to Albuquerque at the end of May. Ten days later she wrote McClure that she was just back from a long and delightful horseback trip into the desert. She was then at Lamy, the nearest town to Santa Fe on the main line of the railroad, and about to leave for Red Cloud. She went roundabout through El Paso, where she caught a Southern Pacific train that took her back into the Middle West. By June 12 she was home and writing to McClure about his problems. But she also summarized her stay in the Southwest. She had not written a line since leaving the East, but she had returned with such a head full of stories that she was dreaming about them at night. She had ridden and driven hundreds of miles in Arizona and New Mexico, and McClure would not recognize her, she was so dark-skinned and good-humored. She urged McClure to forget how cranky she used to be when she was tired. She could not bear to be remembered that way, and she resolved never to get fussy like that again. She was now happier than she had been since she was a youngster. Those weeks off in the desert with her big, handsome brother were weeks that she would never forget. They took all the kinks and crinkles out, and she felt as if her mind had been freshly washed and ironed and made ready for a new life. She felt somehow confident, as if she had gotten her second wind.

In describing her return to civilization to Sergeant she put it another way. The Southwest had been so big and so consuming that she was now glad to be back in the East, where she could slowly come to herself without that swift, yellow excitement to think of. Before she left, the real meaning came to her of a sentence she once had carelessly read in Balzac: "Dans le desert, voyezvous, il y a tout et il n'y rien; Dieu sans les hommes" ("In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing; God without men"). That sentence really means a great deal, she wrote. She was sitting mournfully beside the Rio Grande one day, just outside a beautiful Indian village, Santo Domingo, when she looked up and saw that sentence written in the sand. It explained what was the matter with her. One could play with the desert, love it, and go hard night and day and be full of it and quite tipsy with it, and then there came a moment when one must kiss it goodby and go, go bleeding, but go.

CHAPTER 1

Virginia

Back Creek Valley in Frederick County, Virginia, at the end of 1873 was a thinly settled district on the Northwest Turnpike linking Winchester and Romney, some thirty miles to the west. The farms in that part of the Shenandoah Valley, which lies some fifty miles west-northwest of the national capital, were mostly hilly, and their thin, rocky soil was not well suited to agriculture. The farmers would have been poor even if marauding soldiers had not destroyed their crops, driven off their stock, and burned their barns during the Civil War. Because the land was poor, field hands were not needed there as on the richer plantations farther east. No family had owned more than a few slaves before the war, and many settlers who did not believe in slavery owned none and worked their slatey acres with their own sweat. So much of the land was still wild forest that the lumber they had in abundance was of no value at all. The people along Back Creek were predominantly Protestant, a mixture of Calvinists from Northern Ireland and German Lutherans, many newly arrived in the United States, augmented by native Pennsylvanians or older immigrants who had moved down into Virginia. Some, like Willa Cather's parents, were fourth-generation Virginians.

Less than a decade after the Civil War ended, the South was still recovering from the wracking agonies of the terrible conflict. Although Virginia escaped much of the punishment inflicted on the Confederacy during Reconstruction and was readmitted to the Union by 1870, the state had lost thousands of its young men and had been a battleground during much of the war. The Shenandoah Valley in particular was a strategic highway connecting North and South. Winchester, the county seat, stood at the crossroads of major highways running north and south, east and west, the latter being the Northwest Turnpike. The area had been stubbornly fought over throughout the four-year struggle, and Winchester changed hands many times. One resident of the area remembered:"So rapidly did it change hands that the inhabitants found it necessary [each morning] to look to the surrounding forts to see which flag was floating over them." The register at the Taylor Hotel had many pages with names of officers of both sides under the same date: Union officers had eaten dinner; Confederate officers had spent the night.

"Stonewall" Jackson had humiliated the Union forces under General Nathaniel Banks in the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862. General Philip Sheridan had turned defeat into a victory with his famous ride from Winchester to Cedar Run in October 1864 and had finally defeated Confederate general Jubal A. Early there the following March, a few weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Although the valley was largely Southern in its sympathies and did not, as West Virginia did, split away from the Confederacy, many pro-Northerners lived there, and the sectional differences that divided father and son, brother and brother, sister and sister, were nowhere more evident. Prominent among the Union supporters in the valley was William Cather, grandfather of Willa.

The Cather family originated in Wales. After Willa Cather had become a well-known novelist, she received a letter one day from a Cather in England asking if she were a descendant of the Jasper Cather who had emigrated to America from Northern Ireland. This distant English cousin explained that the original family home was the Cadder Idris, the highest mountain in Wales, from which the name apparently had come. An ancestor in the seventeenth century, the cousin also reported, had fought for Charles I, and in appreciation Charles II after the Restoration had given land in Ireland to Edmund and Bertram Cather, twin brothers, who then had settled in County Tyrone. There is a Cather coat of arms in British records of heraldry: a buck's head cabossed on a shield surmounted by a crest of a swan among reeds with the motto "Vigilans non cadet" ("He who is vigilant will not fall").

This Jasper Cather, who was the first Cather in America, was a red-haired schoolteacher who settled in Western Pennsylvania around the middle of the eighteenth century. He fought in the Revolution, but little is known about him until he turned up in Frederick County, Virginia, after independence and bought land on Flint Ridge, two miles southeast of Back Creek Valley. In 1786 he married Sarah Moore, who bore him seven children, one of whom was James Cather, the great-grandfather of Willa, born in 1795. James in 1819 married Ann Howard, whose parents had emigrated from Ireland in the last year of the eighteenth century, when she was an infant. She bore James eight children, one of whom was William, the grandfather of Willa.

James Cather, who was much admired by his grandson Charles, Willa's father, was a man of some distinction in the community. A local historian describes him as "above the average farmer in intellect. Possessed with rare physical strength and wonderful energy, these qualities gave him an advantage over weaker men. Always informed on the current topics of the day, his conversational abilities were admirable. Young men were always benefited by having him as a friend." James, who lived to be eighty, is much like Mr. Cartmell, the postmistress's father in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. As young Rachel Blake overhears him talking to his daughter, she thinks that his "talk had a flavour of old-fashioned courtesy." Mr. Cartmell also believes, as James Cather and his widowed daughter Sidney Gore did, that owning slaves is wrong.

James, however, sided with the South during the Civil War. Though he opposed both slavery and secession, he believed strongly in states' rights, and as a member of the legislature voted with the majority when Virginia left the Union. He made the same painful decision many southerners made that fateful spring. Robert E. Lee wrote his sister on April 10, 1861: "With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor service may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword." The choice was easier, however, for James Cather, farmer, than for an army officer and West Point graduate.

William Cather, Willa's grandfather, grew up on the Flint Ridge farm and in 1846 married Emily Anne Caroline Smith. William and Caroline are important characters in My Ántonia (1918), though they are seen there as an elderly couple after they have joined the westward movement and resettled in Nebraska. Cather's narrator, Jim Burden, who goes to live with his grandparents after the death of his Virginia parents, describes his grandfather: "My grandfather said little . . . . I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly snow-white beard . . . . His bald crown only made it more impressive. Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle." In his photograph William looks like an Old Testament prophet, and in keeping with this appearance, he was deeply religious. In his youth his conscience had led him to drop his inherited Calvinism and become a Baptist.

Caroline Cather, whose father kept a popular tavern on the turnpike, was descended from Jeremiah Smith, who came to Virginia from England in 1730. He had been deeded land on Back Creek in 1762 by Lord Fairfax, who, one remembers, once had employed George Washington to survey his vast holdings. The deed to this small parcel of Fairfax's five million acres still remains in the possession of Cather descendants. To Jim Burden his grandmother appears "a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention . . . . She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection . . . . Her laugh, too, was high and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance."

In 1851 William and Caroline settled on a farm about a mile east of the village of Back Creek. William bought 130 acres and later more than doubled his property. He built a large, solid three-story brick house on the north side of the turnpike and named it Willow Shade. It still stands on the outskirts of what is now the town of Gore. Across the façade are five large single windows, each with twelve panes, and behind is a brick extension rising two stories. Each room once had a fireplace, and surrounding the house in the nineteenth century were great willow trees. A stream ran through the front yard, spanned by a rustic bridge, and a spring from the mountain behind provided cool water for refrigeration and household use. A flight of steps still leads to a porch supported by white columns and an entranceway into the second story. Across the turnpike is a steep hill that cuts off the view from the lower story.

As an adult, Cather remembered the kitchen on the ground floor as being the most pleasant room in the house, also the most interesting. The parlor was stiff and formal except when it was full of company, which was often, but the kitchen was comfortable. Besides the eight-hole range, there was a huge fireplace with a crane to lift heavy pots. There was always a roaring fire in the winter, which was kept up at night after the stove fires went out. There were three kitchen tables: one for making bread, another for pastry, and a third covered with zinc used for cutting up meat. There were also tall cupboards used for storing sugar and spices and groceries. The farm wagons brought supplies from Winchester in large quantities so that the Cathers did not have to make the trip often. There was a special cupboard that held jars of brandied fruit, ginger, and orange peel soaking in whiskey. Vegetables for winter were kept in a storeroom at the back cooled by the spring that supplied the house. This house and its surroundings are the center of all of Willa Cather's early memories.

Before she was born, however, the war split the Cathers and alienated neighbors. William and Caroline, as strong Union supporters, broke with William's father and brothers and sisters. Their two sons, Charles (Willa's father) and George, were too young for military duty at the beginning of the conflict, but before the end they were sent across the border less than five miles away to West Virginia to avoid conscription into the Confederate Army. As the war went on around them, the Cathers lived in fear of trouble. Both Confederate and Union troops were continually moving up and down the turnpike and demanding of local residents food and shelter. The Cathers were lucky, however, and survived the war with no great loss of property. On one occasion a neighbor who had remained friendly warned them that Confederate soldiers were about to raid the valley and take all the stock of Northern sympathizers. The Cathers took their animals to the neighbor's barn until the threat passed. Later they returned the favor when Union troops swept through the area. At still another point in the war when an epidemic of measles broke out among occupying Confederate troops, the Cathers turned Willow Shade into an emergency hospital.

The events of the war in Back Creek Valley are vividly recounted in the diary of William Cather's sister, Sidney Gore, a widow who lived in the village and kept a rooming and boarding house. She quartered and ministered to soldiers of both armies and could hear the cannon and rifle fire from the battles fought around Winchester. But no real battles were fought in Back Creek. The Gores' greatest problem was hiding food, money, and livestock from thieving bushwackers who straggled through the valley. Mrs. Gore's son remembered that they put their bread in pillowcases after each meal. They tied their money up with medicinal herbs that were hung from the rafters. They built secret closets in the attic, induced the hens to lay their eggs deep in the woods, fattened their hogs in pens hidden in large piles of firewood, and hid the family silver under a false bottom in the kitchen woodbox.

There were agonizing moments, however. Mrs. Gore was stunned when Union troops killed her neighbor in August 1863. The neighbor had been surprised when asleep by soldiers' appearing at the window and without reflecting had grabbed a gun and fired a shot. Whereupon fifty Union soldiers opened fire. On another occasion Willa Cather's Aunt Sidney opened the door to find a Union officer who asked for James Cather. When she said that she was his daughter, the enemy officer introduced himself as her cousin, but family members on opposite sides during the Civil War was a commonplace in Back Creek.

The tragedies of fratricidal war are poignantly set down in Walt Whitman's memory of his experiences as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals: "I staid to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years . . . very feeble, right leg amputated, can't sleep . . . held on to my hand and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave. As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, 'I hardly think you know who I am . . . I am a rebel soldier.' I said I did not know that, but it made no difference . . . . In an adjoining ward I found his brother, an officer of rank, a Union soldier . . . wounded in one of the engagements at Petersburgh . . . . It was in the same battle both were hit. One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought on their respective sides, both badly wounded, and both brought together here . . . . Each died for his cause."

After Lee's surrender the Back Creek boys came home to their farms and set about planting their neglected fields, which had been farmed in their absence by the women and children. Most of them had been Confederate soldiers. They still had their land, but there were few horses left to work the soil, most having been driven off or killed as the tide of battle surged back and forth. They also had to replenish their livestock. Cather writes in Sapphira: "The Rebel soldiers who came back were tired, discouraged, but not humiliated or embittered by failure. The country people accepted the defeat of the Confederacy with dignity, as they accepted death when it came to their families. Defeat was not new to these men. Almost every season brought defeat of some kind to the farming people. Their cornfields, planted by hand and cultivated with the hoe, were beaten down by hail, or the wheat was burned up by drought, or cholera broke out among the pigs. The soil was none too fertile, and the methods of farming were not very good.

"The Back Creek boys were glad to be at home again; to see the sun come up over one familiar hill and go down over another. Now they could mend the barn roof where it leaked, help the old woman with her garden, and keep the woodpile high. They had gone out to fight for their home State, had done their best, and now it was over. They still wore their army overcoats in winter, because they had no others, and they worked the fields in whatever rags were left of their uniforms. The day of Confederate reunions and veterans' dinners was then far distant."

William Cather, however, profited by his Union allegiance and after the war was appointed sheriff for Frederick County by the military government, a job that he performed with the aid of his sons as deputies. He also ended the war more affluent than his neighbors, and after life returned to normal hired a Baptist preacher to conduct a school at Willow Shade. All the people of the neighborhood, Northern and Southern sympathizers alike, were invited to send their children. In addition, he sent some of the older ones-including his son Charles and a neighbor's daughter, Mary Virginia Boak, who had had three brothers in the Confederate Army-to school in Baltimore. These acts helped heal the wounds caused by the war, and the healing process was abetted further when Charles Cather and Mary Virginia Boak fell in love. They were married on December 5, 1872, in the home of the bride's mother, Rachel Boak.

Rachel Boak, whose influence on her granddaughter was considerable, has been portrayed indelibly as Old Mrs. Harris in Cather's story of that name and as Rachel Blake in Sapphira. Her family history furnished the plot of that novel: her father was the miller and her mother the title character. She was the one who helped the slave Nancy escape via the underground railway to Canada. In real life she had been born Rachel Elizabeth Seibert in 1816. She married William Lee Boak at the age of fourteen and was widowed at thirty-eight. Her husband, who was three times a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, died in Washington as an official of the Department of the Interior. When Rachel returned to Virginia with a family of five, her father bought her a house in the village. There she raised her children and ministered to the sick, as Rachel Blake does in the novel. She abhorred slavery, as the William Cathers did, but when the war came, her three sons served the Confederacy. Only two returned from the war. William Seibert Boak died at nineteen as the result of wounds received at Manassas.

Cather in 1902 dedicated a poem to his memory,"The Namesake," and after going to Pittsburgh adopted Seibert as her own middle name, though she always spelled it Sibert. She also liked to pretend that she was named for this uncle she never had met. She writes:
Somewhere there among the stones,
All alike, that mark their bones,
Lies a lad beneath the pine
Who once bore a name like mine,—
Flung his splendid life away
Long before I saw the day.

And the poem ends:
And I'll be winner at the game
Enough for two who bore the name.

Cather also wrote a story in 1907 with the same title as the poem, in which a sculptor explains to his colleagues that the inspiration for his statue The Color Sergeant came from his uncle who was killed in the war. Cather's mother always revered this brother and kept his sword and a Confederate flag with her when the family moved to Nebraska.

When Cather was editing the Home Monthly in Pittsburgh, she wrote an article on nursing as a profession for women. She used her grandmother as an example "of those unprofessional nurses who served without recompense, from the mere love of it. She had a host of little children of her own, poor woman, but when a child was burned, when some overworked woman was in her death agony, when a man had been crushed under falling timber, or when a boy had cut his leg by a slip of the knife in the sumach field, the man who went to town for the doctor always stopped for her on the way. Night or day, winter or summer, she went . . . . I have often heard the old folks tell how, during those dreadful diphtheria scourges that used to sweep over the country in the fifties, she would go into a house where eight or ten children were all down with the disease, nurse and cook for the living and 'lay out' the dead."

Grandmother Boak as Rachel Blake in Sapphira is a "short, stalwart woman in a sunbonnet, wearing a heavy shawl over her freshly ironed calico dress . . . a woman of thirty-six or-seven, though she looked older." The set of her head was "enduring yet determined," her face broad,"highly coloured," her "fleshy nose, anchored deeply at the nostrils," her eyes grave and dark,"set back under a broad forehead." As Grandma Harris, she is seen by her neighbor Mrs. Rosen: "There was the kind of nobility about her head that there is about an old lion's: an absence of self-consciousness, vanity, preoccupation-something absolute. Her grey hair was parted in the middle, wound in two little horns over her ears, and done in a little flat knot behind. Her mouth was large and composed,-resigned, the corners drooping."

Charles Cather, Willa's father, was an amiable young man, soft-spoken and tender-hearted. He was tall, fair-haired, gentle, and did not inherit the inflexible will and evangelical zeal of his Calvinist-turned-Baptist father. He was handsome in a boyish southern way and never hurt anybody's feelings. Willa Cather loved him dearly and was always much closer to him than to her mother. Before his marriage Charles had studied law for two years, and though he never practiced, he often was called on to help his neighbors untangle their affairs; when he gave up farming in Nebraska to open an insurance office in Red Cloud, his legal training was useful. He appears in a partial portrait in "Old Mrs. Harris" as Mr. Templeton, an easygoing businessman who hates to press his debtors: "His boyish, eager-to-please manner, his fair complexion and blue eyes and young face, made him seem very soft to some of the hard old money-grubbers on Main Street, and the fact that he always said 'Yes, Sir,' and 'No, sir,' to men older than himself furnished a good deal of amusement to by-standers." But his appearance was deceiving. Charles Cather operated Willow Shade profitably, later made money farming in Nebraska, and as a businessman in Red Cloud supported a large family.

Mary Virginia Boak, Willa's mother, who had taught school in Back Creek Valley before her marriage, was a woman of energy and force. Handsome and domineering, she provided the power that drove the household, often producing sparks, and she more than made up for Charles's easygoing manner. She ruled her family tyrannically, exacted strict obedience to a domestic discipline, and punished disobedience with a rawhide whip. Her children, however, apparently never objected to her draconian measures for enforcing good behavior. She also had a great capacity for enjoying life and for caring about things—whether the coffee was hot, whether a neighbor's child was ill, whether the weather was right for a picnic. She had the good sense to let her children develop their own personalities. Willa Cather remembered in her old age that her mother kept her seven children clean but allowed them to be individuals from the time they could crawl. She cared for their bodies and kept her hands off their souls. They were all different, and she let them be different. As Victoria Templeton in "Old Mrs. Harris," she is seen through the eyes of the title character: "Victoria had a good heart, but she was terribly proud and could not bear the least criticism." Willa inherited her mother's temperament, and the two often clashed.

One of Mary Virginia's projects early in her marriage was to bring her divided families together again. She planned a large party at Christmastime in 1875 and drove about the valley issuing her invitations in person. Because of her charm and the fact the Boaks had been staunch supporters of the Confederacy, none of the pro-Southern relatives was able to decline. The war, of course, had been over for a decade, and it no doubt was time for reconciliation. Besides, as the William Cathers were such a prominent part of the family, it was very inconvenient to keep up the enmity. Everyone showed up, and the party was a great success. William's mother, Ann Howard Cather, then seventy-seven, attended the festivities and had the satisfaction of seeing her sons and daughters once again at peace with each other.

Charles and Mary Virginia (usually called Jennie) lost no time in starting a family. By March 1873 Jennie was pregnant. Caroline Cather, her mother-in-law, wrote to one of her daughters after Jennie began to have morning sickness that Charles's Jennie was sick and had called the doctor twice. "I went up to see her with your Aunt Sidney and I think we understand her case as well as the Dr. and think he was not needed as much now as he may be after while, but I did not tell her so for she is so easily insulted. I knew she would fly right up for she thinks she is awfully sick. Her mother and Charley [have] a happy time waiting on her." Less than eight months later, as the winter began mildly, Willa Cather was born in her grandmother's house in Back Creek Valley on December 7, 1873.

She was named Wilella after her father's youngest sister, who had died of diphtheria in childhood, but she was always called Willie by her family and oldest friends. Willa was her own invention and appears in her own hand in the family Bible, altered from the original Wilella. The weather turned cold in January, when the first report of the baby appears in the record. Charles wrote his brother George, who had gone west to Nebraska: "We have just been treated to a slice of cold weather; the first of the season-last week we had three of our coldest days so far. The thermometer stood at 10 above zero . . . . We filled our ice house during the freeze . . . . Jennie and I were at town today. Jennie went to have a tooth drawn, the first time she has been out. We left the baby at home with its grandma. She said it did not cry once while we were gone. She grows very fast, and is just as good as she is pretty." This description is perhaps a proud father's exaggeration, for the earliest photograph extant is not particularly attractive. It shows a rather square head, very prominent ears, and a large nose, but by the time Willa was a little girl her features had refined, and she begins to be recognizable as the adult Willa Cather.

In the fall of 1874 William and Caroline Cather left Virginia to visit their son George, who had married a New England girl and had taken up a homestead in Nebraska. They left Charles and Jennie in charge of the farm. The young Cathers and the baby moved into Willow Shade, where they lived until they too, in 1883, decided to go west. In mid-February Jennie wrote her sister- and brother-in-law in Nebraska that Willa was walking and beginning to talk. She was then fourteen months old. While Jennie minded the baby and looked after the house, Charles supported his wife and child by raising sheep. Not much of his father's land could be farmed profitably, but sheep found a ready market in Washington and Baltimore. He ran the farm efficiently and, according to his nature, tender-heartedly. When his favorite sheep dog cut its paws, he fashioned little leather shoes to protect its feet from the rocks, and, Willa Cather remembered, the dog would come begging for its shoes. Her most vivid memories of early childhood, however, were the times her father carried her with him when he went out at night to drive the sheep into the fold. Her poem "The Swedish Mother," published in McClure's Magazine in 1911, recalls this early experience. The mother is telling the child about her childhood:
All time in spring, when evening come,
We go bring sheep and li'l' lambs home.
We go big field, 'way up on hill,
Ten times high like our windmill.
One time your grandpa leave me wait
While he call sheep down. By de gate
I sit still till night come dark;
Rabbits run an' strange dogs bark,
Old owl hoot, and your modder cry,
She been so 'fraid big bear come by.
Last, 'way off, she hear de sheep,
Li'l' bells ring and li'l' lambs bleat.
. . . . . . .
Then come grandpa in his arms
Li'l' sick lamb that somet'ing harm
He so young then, big and strong,
Pick li'l' girl up, take her 'long.

Early memories of childhood are like islands in an empty sea—isolated and unconnected to each other. As an adult, Cather's earliest memory was of a ride in a steamboat when she was still an infant. She could remember the terror she felt as she held tightly to her mother while being taken on board. She also recalled another occasion at about the age of three when her parents went ice-skating on Back Creek and took her with them. Skating was a sport they loved and one that she also enjoyed later in Nebraska. She was not content to sit and watch, however, but wanted attention. Her indulgent father cut a pine bough, set her on it, and pulled her across the ice. She remembered still another time when she was taken visiting up on Timber Ridge. She was supposed to walk home because it was all down hill, but as she was on her way a violent rainstorm came up, and she was wearing only a pair of light slippers. Providentially, Snowden Anderson, a man she hardly knew, came up from his house on the Hollow Road riding a gray horse and wearing an old gray Confederate Army overcoat. He stopped, picked her up, sat her on the old cavalry saddle in front of him, and took her home. She remembered feeling contented and safe. Children, she thought, knew when people were honest and good. They did not reason about it. They just knew. At least that is the way she felt about her Virginia childhood some sixty years after.

Many of the incidents of her childhood, however, come from the recollections of her parents. Her mother was fond of showing her daughter's early linguistic proficiency by telling of the visit of a little cousin named Philip Frederic, who came to Willow Shade with his parents. The house was full of guests, as it often was, and Philip Frederic was put in Willa's crib while she slept with her grandmother. After the cousin left, however, Willa refused to go back to her bed: "No, no," she kept repeating, "my cradle is all Philip Frederic'd up." Her precocity was demonstrated other times after she had listened to her grandmother read to her from Peter Parley's Universal History, one of Samuel Goodrich's enormously popular children's books. She would make a chariot by putting one chair upside down on another, climbing on top, and driving the chariot. She would sit silently for long intervals riding while an invisible slave ran beside her repeating the words,"Cato, thou art but man! "

Her grandmother Boak, who had come to live with them, took charge of her preschool education, read to her from the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as from Peter Parley. The Bible she absorbed so thoroughly that her writing throughout her life is loaded with biblical quotations and allusions. John Bunyan's allegory of the Christian life made a deep impression. It was a book, she wrote nearly half a century later, with "scenes of the most satisfying kind; where little is said but much is felt and communicated." At the end of her career, in Sapphira, she has her miller read Bunyan as he wrestles with the moral problem of slavery. Before she was old enough to go to school, her father took her to a private school nearby where older children were being taught, and she was allowed to sit quietly and listen. Her father would carry her over on his horse and leave her there for half a day. Later she attended a school kept by a Mr. Smith in Back Creek.

There is no record of serious illness during Cather's childhood, but she had the usual colds during the damp winters. When she was shut up in the house, she remembered many years later, her parents would send for Mary Ann Anderson (the mother of Snowden), who lived up on the ridge, to come down and help out. Cather used to watch out of the front windows, hoping to see Mrs. Anderson come down the road: she was such fun to talk to and very kind to a sick child. She became a great favorite and appears as Mrs. Ringer in Sapphira, the woman who "was born interested." Cather renewed her childhood friendship with Mrs. Anderson when she returned to Virginia in 1896 and heard from her all the stories of the lives of people she had known as a child. "She got a great deal of entertainment out of the weather and the behaviour of the moon. Any chance bit of gossip that came her way was a godsend . . . . Her spirits bubbled into the light like a spring and spread among the cresses."

Mrs. Anderson's simple-minded daughter Marjorie was one of Cather's companions, though much older, after she came to work at Willow Shade as nurse and housemaid. She and Willa roamed the woods and fields together and often walked up the double-S road, which Cather later thought the most beautiful piece of country road she had found anywhere in the world, to visit Margie's mother and listen to her tales of local folklore. Cather loved Margie, who served the family with single-minded devotion for the rest of her life. She and her brother accompanied the Cathers to Nebraska, and she was ultimately buried in the family plot in Red Cloud in 1928. Margie lived in Cather's imagination as Mahailey in One of Ours, Mandy in "Old Mrs. Harris," Sada in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the title character in the poem "Poor Marty," written after Margie died. In One of Ours Cather writes: "She had never been sent to school, and could not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time . . . and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet . . . . [However] Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to lose her good opinion." Cather understood this humble and defenseless woman, felt very protective of her, and when she visited Red Cloud in later years she often spent hours talking to Margie in the backyard or working with her in the kitchen. Both women shared a fondness for children. Margie loved to talk of old times in Virginia; and Cather's father, who subscribed to the weekly Winchester paper, always told her the news from home. After she died, Cather wrote in "Poor Marty":
Little had she here to leave,
Nought to will, none to grieve.
Hire nor wages did she draw,
But her keep and bed of straw.

Companions more Cather's own age included Mary Love, the daughter of the doctor who delivered her. Mary's grandfather had been minister to France in 1860-61, and Mary's mother liked to talk about her education in France and her experiences as a diplomat's daughter. Cather's lifelong love affair with France may well have begun with these accounts. Willa also had the companionship of her brother Roscoe, called Ross by the family, who was born in 1877. Douglass, who came along in 1880, did not become her close friend and confidant until they were growing up in Red Cloud years later. Jessica, the fourth and last child born in Virginia, was eight years younger, very different from Willa in temperament, and the two sisters had little to say to each other.

Young Willa Cather roamed the woods and the fields. She visited the mill house where her grandmother had grown up and the mill on Back Creek where her Great-grandfather Seibert had been the miller. There were plenty of rabbits in the woods, and she set traps that her father made for her. When she revisited Virginia thirteen years after the family moved away, she walked straight to her traps and found them still intact. A little to the west of Willow Shade was a suspension bridge over the creek. There she liked to walk to the middle and recite, "I stood on the bridge at midnight, / As the clocks were striking the hour."

Life at Willow Shade was orderly, comfortable, and continuously interesting. It was a stable world for a child to grow up in. The Cathers were better off than many of their neighbors, and there were always servants in the house to talk to and a few field hands, both black and white, on the farm to watch. There was a huge sheep barn, standing three stories and a loft above its ground-floor pens, where children could play. Spinning and quilting, butter-making, preserving, and candle-making went on regularly. Old women from the mountains came down to help during the busy seasons. Butchering, sheep-shearing, tanning of hides were done on the farm. During the winter evenings the black help sat around the kitchen fireplace, cracking nuts, telling stories, and cutting old clothes into strips, winding the strips into balls to send to Mrs. Kearns, a neighbor who made them into rag rugs. There was also a steady stream of guests at Willow Shade. The tin peddler and Uncle Billy Parks, the broom-maker, came often and were housed overnight in the two-story wing at the back of the house. Cather remembered once emptying her savings bank and giving the contents to Uncle Billy. More important guests, relatives from all over, friends from Winchester, sometimes even Washington, came to visit or stop over on their way somewhere else. It was open house most of the time.

The orderliness and continuity of Lather's first nine years in Virginia left their mark on her values and personality. Her old friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who knew her from the time she was sixteen, wrote that she spent this formative "period of life which most influences personality in a state which had the tradition of continuity and stability as far as they could exist in this country, and in a class which more than any other is always stubbornly devoted to the old ways of doing things." Cather always cherished tradition, and the older she grew, the more she felt the need to cling to the values she had grown up with. She watched with profound sorrow the ravages of World War I, then the Great Depression, and finally, late in her life, World War II and felt at the end that the world she knew had largely vanished.

By far the most memorable event of Cather's childhood occurred when she was five. This was the return of Nancy Till, the ex-slave her grandmother had helped escape. The event is recreated as the epilogue for Sapphira. On a clear, windy March day in 1879 Cather was in bed with a cold in her mother's bedroom on the third floor of Willow Shade. She had been put there so that she could watch the turnpike to see the stage when it appeared. Nancy was coming home from Montreal, where she had lived for twenty-five years following the midnight flight in which Rachel Boak had taken her across the Potomac River and delivered her to agents of the underground railroad. Suddenly her mother hurried into the room, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her to the window as the stage stopped before the house. A woman in a black coat and turban descended. Then she was put back to bed. Old Till, who worked for the Cathers and was Nancy's mother, stayed in the room with the child so that the recognition scene could be enacted in her presence. There was talking on the stairs, and a minute later the door opened: "Till had already risen; when the stranger followed my mother into the room, she took a few uncertain steps forward. She fell meekly into the arms of a tall, gold-skinned woman, who drew the little old darky to her breast and held her there, bending her face down over the head scantily covered with grey wool. Neither spoke a word. There was something Scriptural in that meeting, like the pictures in our old Bible."

Sixty-four years later Cather still could remember the scene as though it had just happened. She wrote in 1943 that Nancy's dress in the novel is described in more detail than she could remember about a friend she had seen the week before. It all happened just as she told it, and it was the most exciting event of her life up to that time. Nancy already had become a legend in the community, and Mrs. Cather often had sung her daughter to sleep with,
Down by de cane brake, close by de mill,
Dar lived a yaller gal, her name was Nancy Till.

Another dramatic event occurred about the same time with five-year-old Willa as participant, but that experience was terrifying rather than exciting. She was playing by herself in an upstairs room at Willow Shade when a half-witted boy, the son of one of the servants, slipped into the room brandishing an open jackknife. He said he was going to cut off her hand. She was terrified. In recalling the experience, however, Cather remembered that she was scared, but she also knew that she must not show any sign of fear. She began talking to the boy to distract him and edging towards the window. Outside the room was a tall tree whose branches one could reach out and touch. She suggested to the boy that it would be fun to climb out the window and descend to the ground without having to go back down the stairs. The new idea drove out the old one. The boy forgot what he had planned to do, went out the window, and climbed down the tree.

Though the strategem worked, the experience left a deep trauma. Throughout her life Cather had a horror of mutilation, especially of the hands. Time and again in her fiction this horror appears—almost like an obsession. In an early story written while Cather was still in college,"The Clemency of the Court" (1893), Serge is tied by his arms in prison until "they were paralyzed from the shoulder down so that the guard had to feed him like a baby." In "The Profile" (1907) one of the characters speaks of the human body as sanctified by nature,"but lop away so much as a finger, and you have wounded the creature beyond reparation." In "The Bohemian Girl" (1912) Eric tears his hand on a cornsheller. In "The Namesake" (1907) Lyon's hand and forearm are torn away by exploding shrapnel. In "Behind the Singer Tower" (1912) an opera singer jumps from a burning hotel, flings his arm out, and his hand is "snapped off at the wrist as cleanly as if it had been taken off by a cutlass." In One of Ours (1922) Claude Wheeler and his company move into a captured trench, at the top of which the hand of a dead German reaches out "like the swollen roots of some noxious weed." In Shadows on the Rock (1931), when a missionary is feasting with a group of Huron Indians,"they pulled a human hand out of the kettle to show him that he had eaten of an Iroquois prisoner." When Aunt Jezebel, the old slave who was born in Africa, is dying in Sapphira and will not eat, she is told that she must eat to keep up her strength. She replies that nothing would tempt her "lessen maybe it was a li'l' pickaninny's hand." In Cather's unfinished novel laid in medieval Avignon, which she was writing when she died, one of the main characters was punished for thievery by being strung up by the thumbs so that his hands became useless.

In respect to this horror of mutilation Cather's life imitated her art. In 1934 she tore the big tendon in her left wrist and had to have her hand in splints for over a month, and four years later someone accidentally smashed one of her hands while she was shopping in a drugstore. In 1940, after signing five hundred copies of a de luxe edition of Sapphira for Knopf in three days, she had to have her right hand tied up in splints. The next year her hand was still in such bad shape that an orthopedic surgeon designed a special brace, which she wore for eight months in 1941 and off and on for the rest of her life.

If her quick wit saved her from the half-witted boy, on another occasion her wit must have embarrassed her elders. Among the guests who streamed through Willow Shade was an old judge to whom she apparently took an immediate dislike. The judge took the liberty of stroking her curls and addressing her with a string of platitudes that might have been acceptable to a child of less precocity. She stood it as long as she could, then blurted out: "I'se a dang'ous nigger, I is!" It is tempting to see in this episode the beginnings of Cather's adult distaste for the polite conventions and ritual blather of genteel southern society. Her friend Edith Lewis wrote in her memoir of Cather that "even as a little girl she felt something smothering in the polite, rigid social conventions of that Southern society—something factitious and unreal. If one fell in with those sentimental attitudes, those euphuisms that went with good manners, one lost all touch with reality, with truth of experience."

Cather always had ambivalent feelings about her southern background. When she revisited Virginia in 1913, she was eager to get away from the romantic southern attitude she found in both sexes, but the men in particular were all cowed and broken, good only for carrying wraps, dancing, and tipping their hats. She didn't go back to Virginia for a quarter of a century. In 1931 she did not want to be considered a southern writer and declined to serve on a committee of southern writers. During World War II when her niece and her doctor husband moved to Tennessee, she wrote an old friend that going south had to her a slight connotation of going backward. She told another old friend that southerners, herself included, scorn accurate knowledge and always think they can get by with "pretty near." She also never quite lost her southern accent, though she thought she had, and she was much surprised when she was vacationing incognito in New England in 1942 and someone recognized her, he said, by her southern accent.

On the other hand, she much admired her mother, despite clashes of personality, for her bearing as a southern lady and very much wanted to be one herself. When she was preparing to write her only novel about Virginia, she revisited the Shenandoah Valley in 1938 with Edith Lewis, and then memories refined and softened by time came flooding back. Lewis writes: "It was as memorable an experience, as intense and thrilling in its way, as those journeys in New Mexico, when she was writing the Archbishop. Every bud and leaf and flower seemed to speak to her with a peculiar poignancy, every slope of the land, every fence and wall, rock and stream. [But] I remember how she spoke of the limp, drooping acacia trees in bloom along all the roadsides—how they had the shiftless look that characterized so many Southern things, but how their wood was the toughest of all."

Her mixed emotions about Virginia may have kept her from making significant literary use of her childhood memories until she wrote Sapphira more than five decades after leaving the South. Lewis says she often was urged to write a Virginia novel, but for a long time some sort of inhibition deterred her. She sometimes spoke of incidents of her Virginia life that she might write about someday, but she never did. Several of her early stories, however, make use of Virginia memories: "The Elopement of Allen Poole" (1893),"A Night at Greenway Court" (1896),"The Sentimentality of William Tavener" (1900), and "The Namesake" (1907). While these stories are interesting chiefly as apprentice work, they do show that she began her career making use of the total range of her experience.

The first tale,"The Elopement of Allen Poole," published unsigned in The Hesperian, the University of Nebraska literary magazine of which Cather was literary editor, is an amateurish story that attempts to use the dialect of the Virginia mountain people. It is a melodrama of a moonshiner who is shot by the revenuers on the night of his elopement and dies in the arms of his beloved. The sense of place, however, is very strong. After having been away from Virginia for ten years, Cather, even as a sophomore in college, was able to evoke the region memorably, as she later did the Nebraska landscape after she had lived in Pittsburgh and New York for sixteen years. Her creative process required a long immersion of her experience in the deep well of her memory. The landscape she was able to call up in this scene is genuine. Before the fatal shooting in this story Allen throws himself down in the woods beside a laurel bush: "It was the kind of summer morning to encourage idleness. Behind him were the sleepy pine woods, the slatey ground beneath them strewn red with slippery needles. Around him the laurels were just blushing into bloom. Here and there rose tall chestnut trees with the red sumach growing under them. Down in the valley lay the fields of wheat and corn, and among them the creek wound between its willow-grown banks. Across it was the old black, creaking foot-bridge which had neither props nor piles, but was swung from the arms of a great sycamore tree. The reapers were at work in the wheat fields, the mowers swinging their cradles and the binders following close behind. Along the fences companies of barefooted children were picking berries. On the bridge a lank youth sat patiently fishing in the stream where no fish had been caught for years. Allen watched them all until a passing cloud made the valley dark, then his eyes wandered to where the Blue Ridge lay against the sky, faint and hazy as the mountains of Beulah Land."

The next two stories making early use of the Virginia material are less interesting. "A Night at Greenway Court" is a story that takes place in 1752 at the manor house of Lord Fairfax near Winchester, a place Cather certainly had visited as a child. In addition, that noble lord would have interested her because of the land grant he had made to her ancestor. But the story is historical melodrama that probably owes as much to Cather's early fondness for Anthony Hope Hawkins as to her Virginia childhood. It is significant, however, that here Cather makes an early use of a male narrator to tell her story of dueling over a woman's honor. "The Sentimentality of William Tavener" is laid in Nebraska, but the story turns on a reminiscence of Virginia in which a woman urges her farmer husband to let their boys attend the circus. The couple discover that when they were children they both had attended the same circus in their native Virginia. The memory of this experience softens the hardness that had grown up between them, and the boys are sent off to the circus. This is a rather skillful use of what must have been a family story, and it creates what is rare in Cather's fiction—a tender moment of conjugal affection. The feeling is genuine, though the story still is apprentice work.

"The Namesake," which makes the last direct use of Virginia until Sapphira, has intrinsic interest that goes beyond its use of early memories. The story conjures up the image of the uncle who was killed in the Civil War, though the sculptor-narrator who tells the story in Paris makes the uncle a Pennsylvanian. Yet the tale makes clear the powerful pull of family and old memories. Lyon Hartwell, the son of American parents, was born and raised abroad. He is somehow able to capture the spirit of America better in his sculpture than any of his co-artists then working in Paris who have had genuine American upbringings. Hartwell explains to his friends the inspiration for his statue The Color Sergeant, which is the figure of a young soldier running and clutching the folds of a flag, the staff of which has been shot away. Hartwell had gone to Pennsylvania to take care of an invalid aunt living in his grandfather's house on the banks of the Ohio River. During his two years in Pennsylvania he had one day found in the attic an old trunk containing his uncle's clothes, exercise books, letters written home from the army, first books, and even some toys. Inside the cover of a dog-eared Aeneid was inscribed "Lyon Hartwell, January 1862," the year before he had gone off to war at the age of fifteen. Inside the back cover was a crude drawing of the federal flag, and under it in a boyish hand were two lines of "The Star-Spangled Banner." "It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some Egyptian inscription," Hartwell narrates,"but, the moment I saw it, wind and color seemed to touch it."

This experience establishes contact between the sculptor and the uncle for whom he has been named. The experience of that night, he relates, almost rent him to pieces. "It was the same feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground." Cather's subsequent career was full of epiphanies like this, which inspired her novels, but when she wrote this story in 1907, the pull of family was strong, the tug of Virginia weak. She denied her uncle his allegiance to the Confederacy, for by that time she had not lived in Virginia for twenty-four years.

The Cathers' move to Nebraska was a decade in the making. First Willa's Uncle George and Aunt Franc went west in 1873, and the following year her Grandfather and Grandmother Cather left Back Creek Valley to visit Nebraska. They stayed a year, returned to Virginia, stayed only two years, then moved west for good. The Nebraska Cathers began urging Charles to join them, but he resisted for several years. In 1880 Charles went to Nebraska himself to see his father and brother and found them flourishing in their new prairie homes. But he still wasn't convinced. After he returned to Virginia, however, his four-story sheep barn mysteriously burned to the ground, and he took that as an omen. In February 1883, he auctioned off the farm and his equipment for six thousand dollars, and by April the family was in Nebraska. It was a formidable expedition: parents; four children ranging from nine to infancy; Margie Anderson, the hired girl, and her brother Enoch; Mrs. Cather's mother, Rachel Boak, and two of her grandchildren. Most of the furniture went into the auction, and the few things they moved, like dishes, were packed in barrels and shipped with them. Even Old Vic, the sheep dog, for whom Charles Cather had made shoes, was given to a neighbor. Willa remembered poignantly Old Vic on the day of departure. Just as the family was about to board the train at Back Creek, the old dog broke loose and came running across the fields dragging her chain. Young Willa felt that it was more than she could bear.

CHAPTER 2

On The Divide

Throughout the nineteenth century Americans from the eastern states and immigrants from the Old World were moving westward. The westering spirit was endemic in the restless population of the United States, and the aspirations of landless peasants drew Europeans toward America like a magnet. As soon as the Revolution ended and the Ohio Valley was safe for settlers, New Englanders, tired of scratching a living from their rocky fields, went west. They were joined by Virginians lured by the stories of rich land in Tennessee and Kentucky. Then the land east of the Mississippi began to fill up, and pioneers like Daniel Boone left Kentucky for the still-virgin land and wild forests of Missouri. By the middle of the century people from all over were digging for gold in California and later in Colorado and South Dakota. During the Civil War, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which offered free land in the new territories to those who would live on it, and by 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed, making it easy for settlers to reach the promised land.

Virginians in the Shenandoah Valley, exhausted by the Civil War, dispirited by Reconstruction, and eager for more fertile acres, also caught the westering fever. They talked of going west at corn-huskings, quilting bees, and church suppers. When the young men from Back Creek Valley rode into Winchester on Saturday nights, there was talk of it at the hitching post across from the courthouse. Out on the western prairies there were no trees to fell or stones to haul out of the fields. A man could plow a straight furrow as far as the horizon, and the rich top soil was said to be twelve feet deep. Promotional literature circulated widely among the discontented farmers of Virginia, for the railroads needed passengers and buyers for the large tracts of land given them by Congress. One brochure that reached Back Creek Valley asserted that "you can plant a walnut tree and in five years cut the tree for lumber." No one mentioned the grasshopper plagues that periodically stripped the fields of very bit of living vegetation or the lack of water in many places. Nor did they say that speculators were already busy buying up the choicest land and driving up prices.

George and Frances Cather, who were among the first of many Virginians to go west from the Shenandoah Valley, reached Iowa, where they first planned to settle, in September 1873. But there they found that the free government land was gone and that land on the market was already too expensive. They decided to go further west, either to Kansas or Nebraska. By December they had chosen Nebraska, but the free government land around Red Cloud was gone, and they had to go a dozen miles farther north. George bought 360 acres from the Burlington Railroad and hoped to get more. He also staked a claim for a homestead, onto which they moved the following year. Their first winter was mild, and they sent optimistic reports home. By thee following June they wrote that settlers were coming in rapidly, that George was about to dig a well to avoid having to haul water. He already had planted seven apple trees and was writing home for more seeds. They were joined that year by George's parents, Willa's grandparents, who settled on the land George first had acquired about two miles away. Both parents and children at first lived primitively in dugouts they cut into the prairie and roofed over with sod. Despite the grasshoppers the next year and occasional prairie fires, they prospered. George wrote in 1876 that he had beans a foot long and corn eleven feet tall with ears measuring fifteen inches. By this time there were enough settlers in their area to petition Washington for a post office, but after their suggestions of "Grand Prairie" and "Bloomington" were turned down, George, the leader in the effort, said he was going to name the town after himself. He did, andthe post office became Catherton.

The Cathers had a far stronger motivation for moving west than rich, cheap land: the fear of disease. Tuberculosis was a killer in the Shenandoah Valley, and the Cathers seemed especially susceptible to the bacillus. All four of William Cather's brothers already had died of the disease, and two of his daughters, who had contracted tuberculosis, left Virginia too late. One died soon after moving to Nebraska; the other died later. It is no wonder the climate of Frederick County, Virginia, was generally regarded as unhealthy. Soon after settling in Nebraska, George Cather's wife, Aunt Franc, reported that the dry winters on the prairie were just the thing for people with tuberculosis. Everybody she had heard of who had come with lung trouble had been cured. She was too optimistic, of course, but the air of the high plains was much drier than that of the Shenandoah Valley, and the farther west one went, the better it was for weak lungs.

The state of Nebraska, which Willa Cather first saw in April 1883, at the age of nine, is part of the great plain that stretches west from the Missouri River, gradually rising until it reaches the Rocky Mountains. It is a rolling alluvial plain that grows gradually more sandy toward the west until it breaks into the white sand hills of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado. From east to west this plain measures about six hundred miles, and it is watered by slow-flowing, muddy rivers that run full in the spring, often cutting into farm lands along their banks. By midsummer, however, the streams lie low and shrunken, their current split by glistening white sandbars half overgrown with scrub willows.

The climate is capricious. There are sharp variations in temperature, typical of a large inland land mass that lacks the moderating influence of the sea, but there are compensations. Cather wrote in 1923: "We have short, bitter winters; windy, flower-laden springs; long, hot summers; triumphant autumns that last until Christmas—a season of perpetual sunlight, blazing blue skies, and frosty nights. In this newest part of the New World autumn is the season of beauty and sentiment, as spring is in the Old World."

The earliest settlements in Nebraska were along the Missouri River-Bellevue, Omaha, Brownville, Nebraska City—as the river was the natural pathway into the region. But before 1860 civilization did no more than nibble at the eastern edges of the state along the river bluffs. The whole of the great plain to the west was still a sunny wilderness where the tall red grass, the buffalo, and the Indians still possessed the land relatively undisturbed. Fremont, Kit Carson, and the Mormons crossed the state in the early days, and the fortune-seekers followed by the thousands in their Conestoga wagons after the gold rush began in California. It was at Brownville that the first telegraph line was brought across the river into Nebraska. Cather further remembered: "When I was a child I heard Ex-governor Furness relate how he stood with other pioneers in the log cabin where the Morse instrument had been installed, and how, when it began to click, the men took off their hats as if they were in church. The first message flashed across the river into Nebraska was not a market report, but a line of poetry: 'Westward the course of empire takes its way.'"

The Overland Stage, as Mark Twain describes it memorably in Roughing It, jolted regularly across the prairie in the sixties, following the meandering course of the Platte River and the Oregon Trail. When gold and silver were discovered in Colorado, large freight companies were organized to carry supplies across the plains to the mining camps. The wagons, pulled by teams of oxen, toiled over the long stretch of trackless grass from early spring until winter closed down the traffic. The oxen made from ten to twenty miles a day. "I have heard the old freighters say," continued Cather,"that after embarking on their six-hundred-mile trail, they lost count of the days of the week and the days of the month." The buffalo trails still ran north and south—deep, dusty paths the bison wore when, single file, they came north in the spring for summer grass and went south again in the fall. Along the trails were buffalo wallows, where rain collected, and the early settlers found water for their homesteads. The wagon drivers could recognize these water holes by their clouds of golden coreopsis growing out of the water. The grass was full of quail and prairie chickens in those days, and ducks swam on the lagoons.

In the same year that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific met at Promontory, Utah, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by rail for the first time, promoters of the Burlington and Missouri Railroad began building another rail line to link the Midwest with Denver. By 1882 their trains were running between Chicago, Kansas City, and the Colorado capital and passing through the Republican River Valley just north of the Kansas line. The town of Red Cloud, about one hundred and fifty miles west of the Missouri River, became a division point for the new railroad. It was also the county seat of Webster County, which had been organized in 1871, the year the town was settled. By 1880 there were over seven thousand people in the county, but one-third lived in town and the rest were spread thin, about nine per square mile. The pioneering period was coming to an end, even though it had lasted scarcely a decade. Still, much of the land had not yet been broken by the plow, and there was an abundance left of the sea of grass that had covered the prairie states since time immemorial from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains.

When the Cather entourage descended from a Burlington coach in April 1883, they were met at the Red Cloud depot by farm wagons from Catherton. Their destination was Grandfather Cather's farm, some twelve miles northwest of the town. Charles Cather loaded his wife, children, mother-in-law, nephew, and niece, the two Andersons, and all their baggage into the wagons for the final leg of their journey. They drove off on a fine spring day, but the road they traveled was no more than wagon tracks over the still untamed land. The terrain they crossed lay between the Republican River and the Little Blue, an area known locally as "the Divide," which was to be the setting for some of Cather's most memorable fiction. The jolting ride across the open, treeless country made an indelible impression on young Willa. She had come to Nebraska, she wrote later, from "an old and conservative society; from the Valley of Virginia, where the original land grants made in the reigns of George II and George III had been going down from father to son ever since, where life was ordered and settled." Now she was in a brand-new country lost in a sea of grass devoid of human habitation. The familiar mountains that she had seen every day of her life back home had been obliterated. She told an interviewer in 1913:"We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather's homestead one day in April. 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 had heard my father say you had to show grit in a new country, and I would have got on pretty well during that ride if it had not been for the larks. Every now and then one flew up and sang a few splendid notes and dropped down into the grass again. That reminded me of something—I don't know what, but my one purpose in life just then was not to cry, and every time they did it, I thought I would go under."

She did not go under, and in her adult years she wore her allegiance to Nebraska like a badge. For the first week, however, she "had that kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness." She did not like the canned food they had to eat and made a pact with herself that she would not eat much until she could get back to Virginia and get some fresh mutton. The land seemed to her "as bare as a piece of sheet iron" or, as she put it another time, as "naked as the back of your hand." She also told an interviewer in 1921: "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 the shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."

In My Ántonia ten-year-old Jim Burden, Cather's narrator, reacts similarly to his abrupt translation from his native Virginia to Nebraska. Jim's parents have died, and he is being sent to live with his grandparents on the Divide. To heighten the dramatic effect, Cather places the action at night: "Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land . . . . I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it."

Though Cather traveled with her parents, brothers, and sister, she felt Jim's sense of loneliness and loss keenly and never really got over it. Among the several dichotomies in her life, this is one. Throughout her life she was drawn back to the hills and mountains despite her acquired affection for the prairie. When she discovered Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1916, she immediately fell in love with the area and returned year after year for a month or more; and when she died, she was not buried in the family plot at Red Cloud with her parents, but on a hillside at Jaffrey, where one could look up and see "a familiar mountain" (Monadnock) against the sky.

When the Cathers got off the Burlington at Red Cloud, they probably were not the only new settlers arriving that day. Nearly every train brought immigrants from Europe. There were Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Germans, and a few Russians mixed together in the polyglot population of Webster County, and there was a French Canadian settlement a little to the north. Jim Burden's train also brings immigrants, Ántonia's Bohemian family, to Nebraska. Before he is met by his grandfather's hired man, he sees these new arrivals "huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes . . . . The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue."

Coming from the long-settled Shenandoah Valley, Cather also at the age of nine probably never before had heard anything but English. In a biographical sketch she wrote for her publisher many years later to help promote her novels, writing in the third person, she recalls "getting acquainted with the neighbors, whose foreign speech and customs she found intensely interesting. Had she been born in that community, she doubtless would have taken these things for granted . . . . An imaginative child, taken out of the definitely arranged background, and dropped down among struggling immigrants from all over the world, naturally found something to think about." She goes on to say that no child with a spark of generosity could have kept from throwing herself heart and soul into the fight these people were making to master the language, to subdue the soil, to hold their land, and to get on in the world.

The foreign-born population of Nebraska greatly outnumbered the American-born settlers during Cather's childhood and adolescence. The 1910 census reported a foreign population of 900,000 to 300,000 of native stock. Cather remembered: "On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlement in the next county and hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans. There were, of course, American congregations also." She remembered, too, once walking about the streets of Wilbur, only about thirty miles from Lincoln, for a whole day without hearing a word of English spoken.

As an adult, Cather was very critical of the indifference of native-born Americans to the immigrants. This attitude was especially prevalent among Virginians, who back home looked down on foreigners unless they were English or had titles. On the prairie they were seldom open-minded enough to understand the Europeans or to profit by their older traditions. The New England settlers in Nebraska also kept themselves insulated as much as possible from foreign influence and with the Virginians and other southerners were provincial and utterly without curiosity. "If the daughter of a shiftless West Virginia mountaineer," she declared,"married the nephew of a professor at the University of Upsala, the native family felt disgraced by such an alliance."

Cather perhaps exaggerates these feelings, but there is no doubt her mind was being stretched during the months she lived on her grandfather's farm. Her interest in the foreign-born farm families lasted all her life, and when she returned as an adult to visit her parents in Red Cloud, she usually managed to get out into the country to see old friends. She corresponded with them, sent them Christmas boxes, and during the Great Depression and years of drought in the thirties she sent them money and clothes to keep them afloat. She elaborated on the subject of the farm women in her 1913 interview: "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 . . . . these old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talk more freely to a child than to grown people . . . . I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt . . . as if I had actually got inside another person's skin."

When the old farm women began dying off, she wrote an old friend that there formerly had been fourteen of them on her Christmas list. Even when she was working in Pittsburgh and not making much money, she was never too poor to send these old friends some little gift. They loved her, she added, but she had loved them first. Cather romanticizes the old farm women in "The Bohemian Girl," her first important story to use Nebraska memories. In that story Nils Ericson, who has returned to his boyhood farm home after twelve years' absence, attends a barn-raising. All the neighbors for miles around come, especially the old women, who bring their pies, cakes, hams, and fried chicken. Nils's views are Cather's: "They were a fine company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs. Ericson herself." Then he reflects on the Herculean labors those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: "of the cows they had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy."

When Cather told her interviewer that she felt as if she had gotten into another person's skin, she was using a simile that describes accurately her creative process. Her creative imagination required total absorption in her fictional world. She used this figure more than once in letters and interviews, and when she had finished writing novels that created strong central characters like Ántonia Shimerda, Thea Kronborg, and her archbishop, Father Latour, she always felt a sense of loss in parting with her protagonists. The images she was photographing on the brain during her months on the farm provided her first important literary material. A friend once had told her that great writers like Shakespeare or Balzac got thousands and thousands more distinct mental impressions every day of their lives than most men in a lifetime. Her mind worked the same way. Once the image was recorded on her brain, it never left her. But it was not available for immediate use. Her ability to remember mannerisms, turns of phrase, idioms, and all sorts of verbal nuances was like her ability to record visual images. Taking notes for her fiction, she told an interviewer, would kill the material. It was the memory that was important for her, and that went with the vocation. "When I sit down to write, turns of phrase I've forgotten for years come back like white ink before fire." As she told Sergeant, "Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember." She also believed that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. That's the important period, she said. Those years determine whether one's work will be poor and thin or rich and fine. On another occasion she narrowed this time span to the period between the ages of eight and fifteen, thus excluding from her scheme the years she had lived in Virginia.

Although Cather was soaking up impressions that she would use later, there survives from contemporary records only one anecdote of her life on the Divide. This is the memory of friends who saw her one day in 1883 when she was brought into Red Cloud to get new shoes. She was dressed in a leopard-skin fabric coat and hat, which made a lasting visual impression, but what they remembered most vividly was her precocity. As her father encouraged her to show off; she sat in the Miner Brothers' general store and discoursed on Shakespeare, English history, and life in Virginia. This episode in Cather's childhood may have informed the opening scene of O Pioneers! in which little Marie Tovesky, wearing an exotic outfit, is the center of attention in the Hanover (Red Cloud) general store.

The lack of contemporary detail from Cather's months on the farm is compensated for by Jim Burden's memories in My Ántonia. His description of his grandfather's house is very probably based on the home William Cather had built. In real life William returned to Virginia for a visit, leaving the house and farm to Charles, while Caroline, Willa's grandmother, went to live with her other son, George. In the novel the boy Jim wakes up the first morning on the farm and finds himself in a small bedroom on the first floor of the story-and-a-half house built on two levels. His grandmother takes him downstairs to the basement, which opens out onto a draw. In the basement, to the left of the stairs, is the kitchen. To the right is the dining room. Both rooms are plastered and whitewashed—the plaster laid directly upon the earth, as it was in sod-roofed dugouts. The floor is hard cement, and up under the ceiling are little half-windows with white curtains and pots of geraniums. Out behind the house is the farmyard, with a windmill close by the kitchen door. Beyond that are the corncribs, and at the bottom of a shallow draw is a muddy little pond. Farther off, behind the barn, one can see a large cornfield, a sorghum patch, and then nothing but rough, shaggy red grass, most of it as tall as Jim.

A grimmer picture of the view from the farmhouse appears in Cather's early story "A Wagner Matinee." Her memory in 1904 was that outside that door "lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs . . . the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door." And the house itself was "tall, unpainted . . . with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower." Cather is indulging in artistic license when she writes that Jim learned that his grandfather's house was the only wooden building west of Black Hawk, a detail which serves to place the story back in the pioneering era. The pioneers were still there, of course, but most of them long since had built frame houses and abandoned the dugouts that first had served them. Those dugouts still in use when Cather reached Nebraska most likely sheltered animals or were used for storage.

One of the first stories that Cather heard after going to live at Catherton was the account of the suicide of Francis Sadilek, a Bohemian farmer. Readers of My Ántonia will recognize this event as the germ of an early episode in which Mr. Shimerda smashes his fiddle and then shoots himself. The story made a strong impression and furnished the plot for Cather's first published tale, "Peter," written during her freshman year in college. She rewrote it once and republished it twice before using it a fourth time in her novel. Some of the other material in My Ántonia, as well as material in O Pioneers!,"The Bohemian Girl," and early stories that take place on the Divide certainly derive from this time in Cather's life.

Jim Burden's memories of his first months on the Divide are Cather's memories: "All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again." As Jim did, she rode along the sunflower-bordered wagon tracks to get the mail at the Catherton post office, which was located in the Cowley farmhouse two or three miles away. She also went on errands and visited the neighbors, the nearest of whom were the German Lambrechts, whose children became her first Nebraska playmates. German settlers are next-farm neighbors both in My Ántonia and in O Pioneers! Lydia Lambrecht and her mother became lifelong friends, as did Annie Sadilek, the prototype of Ántonia. There is no evidence, however, that Cather met Annie until after she moved into town. Jim Burden remembers: "Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in the branches. Trees were so rare in that country . . . that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons." There were other times that he rode to visit a huge prairie-dog town, but he had to be on guard against the rattlesnakes that preyed on the prairie dogs. Rattlesnakes were always a menace, and one of the first things Cather noticed after arriving at Catherton was the steel-tipped cane her grandmother carried to kill snakes with when she worked in her garden. One of the memorable episodes of My Ántonia is the scene in which Jim kills a huge snake before the fascinated gaze of Ántonia.

The biographer of a writer like Cather, whose memories and experiences are woven into the fabric of her fiction, has to separate the reality from the invention. Cather presents a special problem because she often treats her own life as though it were fiction. In the biographical sketch she provided her publisher she writes: "Willa Cather did not go to school. She had a pony and spent her time riding about the country." This is part of the myth Cather created out of her past, the image of the young girl running wild across the prairie, but the reality is more prosaic. She certainly had a pony, as Jim Burden does, but she also went to school, as he does in the novel. The school district at Catherton had been organized as early as 1876, and by 1883 classes were being held in the township's one-room schoolhouse. Records show that she was enrolled during the winter of 1883-84. She is probably drawing on real experience when Jim Burden says: "After I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians. We were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback and brought our dinner." The rural school at Catherton, however, was a frame building that doubled as a church, but it had only a three-month term, so that Cather is no doubt half accurate when she writes: "All the while that she was racing about over the country by day, Willa Cather was reading at night." She had begun her education at home with her grandmother Boak in Virginia, and she certainly continued this program in Nebraska. In addition, she also must have attended the Sunday school in which her Grandmother Cather taught the primary class every week nine months of the year.

Jim Burden's memories, like Cather's, are set down many years after the fact. By then the ugliness of the prairie had been filtered out, leaving only a retouched mythic landscape. When Cather suggests that she and the country had it out together by the end of the first autumn, she is foreshortening considerably. There is ample evidence, especially in her early stories, to show that the glow that lights the country in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia was a good while in coming. Soon after her first collection of stories, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905, she wrote Witter Bynner to explain the bleak tone of her western tales. She guessed then that her early experiences had clung to her, for she had been pretty much depressed as a child by all the ugliness around her. The contrast with Virginia had been stark. One simply could not imagine anything so bleak and desolate as a Nebraska farm in the 1880s, and she remembered coming as close to dying of homesickness as any healthy child could. About eighteen miles from their farm there was one miserable little sluggish stream, which in the spring was about ten feet wide and in the late summer no more than a series of black mudholes. Along its banks grew a few cottonwoods and dwarf elms. She and her little brothers would do almost anything to get to that creek. The country, moreover, was so treeless that when they went to town for supplies, they could hardly wait to reach a halfway point where a row of Lombardy poplars had been planted as a windbreak. And their first Christmas was never to be forgotten. She and her brothers were taken to a Christmas celebration at the Norwegian church. The Christmas tree was a naked little box elder wrapped in green tissue paper cut in fringes to simulate pine needles. In My Ántonia the Burdens's hired man, Jake, brings home a real Christmas tree, a five-foot cedar, on which they hang gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn, and brilliantly colored paper figures. Both this fictional Christmas described in 1918 and the letter written in 1905 are probably exaggerations. Certainly the Republican River that flows just south of Red Cloud is a good-sized river, and the Little Blue, which is only five miles away, is not "a miserable little sluggish stream."

Life on the farm came to an end in September 1884, less than eighteen months after it began. Charles Cather moved his family into Red Cloud and opened an office to sell real estate, insurance, and to make farm loans. Just why this move took place cannot be documented, but Jennie Cather, who always played the role of a Virginia lady, could hardly have been happy on an isolated Nebraska farm. During the first summer, when she was pregnant for the fifth time, she felt ill, took to her bed, and subsequently lost her baby. Also, on an occasion when she was lying ill in the kitchen, she looked up and saw smoke curling around the chimney. She screamed for help, and Margie Anderson, the hired girl from Virginia, rushed in and carried her out. The fire did not amount to much, but it scared her. It is also likely that Charles Cather did not find raising corn and hogs, fattening cattle, and breaking virgin prairie in Nebraska as congenial an occupation as raising sheep in Virginia. Furthermore, Willa was going on eleven, and she certainly needed better schooling than she could get in the farming community. Whatever the reasons, Charles Cather advertised a second public sale of his stock and farm equipment on September 11, 1884, and soon thereafter the family settled in Red Cloud, the county seat of Webster County.

CHAPTER 3

Red Cloud

There are three famous towns in America that belong both to fact and to fiction: William Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi; Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri; and Willa Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska. Time and change have altered the first two, but Willa Cather today could return to the town of her adolescence and feel at home. The house she grew up in is a National Landmark fully restored; the Miners's store on Third and Webster remains intact; the Burlington depot has been preserved; Silas Garber's bank building is the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Museum. Houses that once were owned by the prototypes of her fictional characters still shelter Red Cloud residents and attract the attention of a steady stream of year-round visitors. An annual spring conference draws scholars, teachers, business people, and professional men and women to Red Cloud for a day devoted to Cather's works. The town actually has shrunk from its maximum population of 1,839 in the 1890 census, when it was a division point on the Burlington Railroad, and now the road sign at the city limits reports 1,200 inhabitants.

Red Cloud (altitude 1,690 feet) was in 1884 about the size it is today, but it was growing vigorously. It had a roundhouse and railroad shops and was the center of a rapidly expanding farming community. Eight passenger trains a day passed through the town, going and coming between Kansas City, Chicago, and Denver. Because the dining car had not yet been introduced, the trains stopped in Red Cloud, and the passengers got off to eat. The Burlington tracks were laid along the Republican River a mile south of the business block, and the hotel and railroad installations were connected to the town by horsecar. The town, which had been founded before the railroad came, did not grow towards the depot but remained where it was. It consisted of one main business street running north and south with several blocks of stores and offices, and at its widest point from east to west there were perhaps a dozen streets. The State Bank Building, made of native brick, which had been built the year before the Cathers moved into town, dominated the business district. The opera house, which was to be one of the centers of Cather's interest, would be erected over a hardware store just to the north the following year.

Red Cloud was barely into its second decade when the Cathers arrived. The first homestead claims were filed in July 1870 by Silas Garber and others, who built a stockade as a protection from hostile Indians. But there was no need for a stockade, as the Indian wars already had moved farther west. The following year the first businesses were built on the town site—a store, a hotel, an eating house—and the stockade was turned into a school house. The next year, 1872, the town was surveyed and its streets laid out. They named it for Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala tribe, who had become a celebrity in 1870 when he made his first trip to Washington to negotiate with the government on behalf of the Sioux.

Although there were no Indian attacks, the town was beyond the line of established communities, and Indian hunting parties frequently passed through the region in search of buffalo, deer, and elk, then still plentiful. The Fourth of July celebration in 1872 was interrupted by a buffalo stampede, but the supply of game disappeared rapidly as the country filled up with farmers. The next year the first newspaper was started, the Red Cloud Chief, and the town prospered despite the early vicissitudes of an Easter blizzard, high winds, and a grasshopper plague that drove out some of the less intrepid pioneers.

Silas Garber, the founder of Red Cloud and a former Union Army officer, went on to greater things—from a sod dugout to the governor's mansion in four years. He became governor in 1874 but returned after serving two terms and built a spacious house on the outskirts of town, where he lived with his young wife until his death. He is an important character in the dramatis personae of Willa Cather's life, for he is the real-life model for Captain Forrester in A Lost Lady; and picnics in Garber's Grove, such as the one that opens the novel, were indelible memories. Cather once said that to work well she had to be carefree as if she were thirteen and going for a picnic in Garber's Grove. The Garber house, which burned down in the twenties,"stood on a low hill, nearly a mile east of town; a white house with a wing, and sharp-sloping roofs to shed the snow. It was encircled by porches, too narrow for modern notions of comfort, supported by the fussy, fragile pillars of that time, when every honest stick of timber was tortured by the turning-lathe into something hideous. Stripped of its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the house would probably have been ugly enough. It stood close into a fine cottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by rail, and the last thing one saw on departing."

This is the description of the house written by Cather at the age of forty-nine, but to the thirteen-year-old girl in 1886 it was a place of infinite charm and elegance. It was the center of a more expansive life-style than anything else she knew in Red Cloud. When Burlington executives traveled back and forth along their railroad, they often stopped off to visit the Garbers. The Garbers entertained graciously, and the captain became in Cather's mind the archetypal pioneer.

Once Cather began her literary career, Red Cloud entered the fictional landscape of America. Again and again the setting of her novels and stories is Red Cloud. It is the Sweet Water of A Lost Lady, the Frankfort of One of Ours, the Haverford of Lucy Gayheart, the Black Hawk of My Ántonia, and the Hanover of O Pioneers! In The Song of the Lark she places Moonstone in Colorado, but the topography of the town is still that of Red Cloud. It is also the locale of two of the stories in Obscure Destinies and of a good many of her early tales written during her apprentice period. Local residents will show you where Doctor Archie lived, where Wick Cutter planned to rape Ántonia, where the Harling family once resided and a descendant still lives.

As Cather describes Moonstone in The Song of the Lark : "The main business street ran, of course, through the center of the town. To the west of this street lived all the people who were, as Tillie Kronborg said, 'in society.' Sylvester Street, the third parallel with Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings were built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from the court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie's house . . . . The Methodist Church was in the centre of town, facing the courthouse square. The Kronborgs lived half a mile south of the church, on the long street that stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This was the first street west of Main, and was built up only on one side . . . . The sidewalk which ran in front of the Kronborgs' house was the one continuous sidewalk to the depot, and all the train men and roundhouse employees passed the front gate every time they came uptown . . . . In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, toward the deep ravine which, farther south, wound by Mexican town, lived all the humbler citizens, the people who voted but did not run for office. The houses . . . nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Virginia creeper; their occupants had no social pretensions to keep up."

Housing was scarce when the Cathers moved into Red Cloud, and they had to make do with a house that was too cramped for four children, parents, grandmother, servant girl, and a cousin. It was a great contrast to the spacious Willow Shade in Virginia. But the house, as it stands on the southwest corner of Third and Cedar, just a block away from the business section, is an attractive frame building surrounded by an ample, well-shaded corner lot. In The Song of the Lark, as Dr. Archie and the Rev. Mr. Kronborg approached the house, "they turned into another street and saw before them lighted windows; a low story-and-a-half house, with a wing built on at the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a little on the slant—roofs, windows, and doors."

Downstairs, besides a sitting room, dining room, and kitchen, there are bedrooms that served the parents and small children. Grandma Boak's room, described in "Old Mrs. Harris," had to serve as a passageway between dining room and kitchen. Up a narrow stairway from the kitchen one climbs to the large unfinished attic, where all the older children lived in a kind of dormitory. In "The Best Years" this attic is the private world of the children "where there were no older people poking about to spoil things." It runs the whole length of the house, and its charm for the children was that it was unlined. "No plaster, no beaver-board lining; just the roof shingles, supported by long, unplaned, splintery rafters that sloped from the sharp roofpeak down to the floor of the attic. Bracing these long roof rafters were cross rafters on which one could hang things." Up the center of this attic passed two brick chimneys "going up in neat little stairsteps from the plank floor to the shingle roof—and out of it to the stars." The beds stood in a row as in a hospital ward, and sometimes during a driving winter snowstorm frozen flakes drifted in through the cracks and sprinkled the beds.

When Cather grew too old to share the dormitory with her brothers, an ell-shaped gable wing of the main attic was partitioned off to give her a private room. This is the room that Thea Kronborg occupies in The Song of the Lark when she begins to make her own money by giving piano lessons. This room, also unplastered, was "snugly lined with soft pine. The ceiling was so low that a grown person could reach it with the palm of the hand, and it sloped down on either side. There was only one window, but it was a double one and went to the floor." Cather worked in Cook's drugstore to earn the wallpaper, given to her in lieu of wages, that she put on the wall of this room. This paper, red and brown roses on a yellowish background, still lines the walls, though it is faded by time and weather. In this room she kept her books and could escape from the rest of the family.

It was probably about the time the family moved to town that Cather produced her first piece of writing that has survived. This is an essay praising dogs and denigrating cats and seems to have been part of a debate judged by her grandfather. The misspellings are Cather's: "The dog is a very intelligent animal . . . . The nature of most dogs is kind, noble and generous. O! how different from the snarling, spitting crul cat . . . . Newfoundland dogs are also famous for their way of saving the lives of people when drowning. And the St. Brenards are often trained in Switzerland to find travelers in the snow and carry them to a place of safety . . . . Lord Byron, one of our greatest poets wrote a beautiful elegy on a dog, who ever wrote anything on a Cat ? Did you ever see a tall massive dog with curly hair bright eyes and a knowing air? Did you ever see a poor thin scraggy cat, with dirty hair dull green eyes and a drooping tail. If so I leave it to your common sense to awnser for I know you will say the noble majestic dog." At the bottom of the page of this essay, in Grandfather Cather's hand and above his signature, is the word "defeated." Although Mozart was composing symphonies at the same age, Cather was still years away from discovering her vocation, and even then her development was very slow. But she was an omnivorous reader from the beginning, and hundreds of books of all kinds stoked the fires of her young mind. The Cathers had brought their books from Virginia, the nearby Wieners had a big collection, and Willa soon began to put together her own library.

Cather's serious schooling also began when the family moved into town. During her first year in Red Cloud she was put into Gertrude Scherer's class, a year that left little impression; but the next year she drew Miss King (later Mrs. Eva J. Case), the principal of the school,"a stalwart young woman with a great deal of mirth in her eyes and a very sympathetic, kind voice," Cather remembered in 1909. "I was a pupil in her A. grade. I am very sure that Miss King was the first person whom I ever cared a great deal for outside of my own family. I had been in her class only a few weeks when I wanted more than anything else in the world to please her. During the rest of that year, when I succeeded in pleasing her I was quite happy; when I failed to please her there was only one thing I cared about and that was to try again and make her forget my mistakes. I have always looked back on that year as one of the happiest I have ever spent . . . . As I went through the high school she always helped and advised me; she even tried very hard to teach me Algebra at night, but not even Miss King—who could do almost anything—could do that." At the end of her life, when Cather wrote "The Best Years," she drew an affectionate portrait of Miss King as Evangeline Knightly. "Miss Knightly was a charming person to meet—and an unusual type in a new country: oval face, small head delicately set (the oval chin tilting inward instead of the square chin thrust out), hazel eyes, a little blue, a little green, tiny dots of brown . . . . Somehow these splashes of colour made light—and warmth. When she laughed her eyes positively glowed with humour, and in each oval cheek a roguish dimple came magically to the surface."

Two other teachers who left their mark on Cather were the A. K. Goudys. Mrs. Goudy was the principal of the high school and became a particular friend and correspondent for forty years. Mr. Goudy was county superintendent of schools and taught Latin. Later when he became state superintendent of schools, the Goudys moved to Lincoln while Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska. When Cather visited Italy for the first time in 1908, she wrote Mrs. Goudy that she had seen in the Naples museum the wonderful head of Caesar that had illustrated the high school text of Caesar's commentaries she had studied under Mr. Goudy. Edith Lewis writes in her memoir: "Both the Goudys became deeply attached to this new pupil, so unlike the run of Red Cloud boys and girls; with her astonishing familiarity with classical English literature, and her inability to spell correctly; her actual love of Latin, and the great gaps in her knowledge of ordinary things every grade school child knew; above all, with a personality so striking in its originality, daring, vital force, that no one could possibly ignore her; she awakened either strong liking or hostility and disapproval."

Cather's extracurricular reading during her adolescent years was more important than her formal education. Red Cloud may have been an instant prairie town, but it contained a fair share of cultivated people. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wiener, educated European Jews who had immigrated to the United States and settled in Nebraska. The Wieners, who owned a store in Red Cloud, lived around the corner from the Cathers on Seward Street. They both spoke French and German, and when they discovered their neighbors' daughter had insatiable appetite for books, they introduced her to French and German literature in translation and gave her the run of their large library. The relationship between the Wieners and Cather appears rather accurately drawn in "Old Mrs. Harris." Although the title character is Grandma Boak, the story contains an engaging portrait of the Wieners and the artist as adolescent. As Vickie Templeton sits in the Rosens' library one hot summer afternoon, Mrs. Rosen observes her: "She wasn't pretty, yet Mrs. Rosen found her attractive. She liked her sturdy build, and the steady vitality that glowed in her rosy skin and dark blue eyes,—even gave a springy quality to her curly reddish-brown hair, which she still wore in a single braid down her back. Mrs. Rosen liked to have Vickie about because she was never listless or dreamy or apathetic. A half-smile nearly always played about her lips and eyes, and it was there because she was pleased with something, not because she wanted to be agreeable. Even a half-smile made her cheeks dimple. She had what her mother called 'a happy disposition.'"

Vickie, for her part, loved the Rosens' cool, darkened library, where she could slip in and read or take a sofa pillow and lie on the floor looking up at the pictures and feeling a happy, pleasant excitement from the heat and glare outside and the deep shadow and quiet within. There was no other house the least like the Rosens': "It was the nearest thing to an art gallery and a museum that the Templetons had ever seen. All the rooms were carpeted alike. . . . The deep chairs were upholstered in dark blue velvet. The walls were hung with engravings . . . . There were a number of water-colour sketches, made in Italy by Mr. Rosen himself when he was a boy." And there was the library: it had a complete set of Waverly novels in German,"thick, dumpy little volumes bound in tooled leather[,] . . . many French books, and some of the German classics done in English such as Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein." Cather was lucky in having the Wieners next door, and apparently they realized her extraordinary talent and encouraged her to go to college, as the Rosens do Vickie Templeton.

The Wiener library was one resource; the family bookcase was another. If the constant commotion in the little Cather house was not conducive to reading, Cather had her own room in the attic to withdraw to. There she read constantly and indiscriminately, good books, trashy books, whatever came her way. "Ray Kennedy [Thea Kronborg's brakeman friend] on his way from the depot to his boarding house, often looked up and saw Thea's light burning when the rest of the house was dark." The evidence in Cather's early writing during her years of journalism is that she had ranged widely in her reading—so widely that no brief summary can do justice to her huge, eclectic consumption of books. Like Vickie Templeton, she had not been taught to respect what the world called masterpieces; she cared about a book only if it took hold of her.

Many of the Cather family books have survived, and one can assume that she read everything in the collection. Among these books are complete editions of the standard nineteenth-century classics: Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Poe, Hawthorne, Ruskin, Emerson, and Carlyle. There also are volumes of Shakespeare and Bunyan, anthologies of poetry, the works of Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore, some translations of Latin and Greek classics, religious books, books on the Civil War, bound volumes of the Century and ladies' magazines; and although now lost, there once were copies of Ben Jonson's plays and Byron's poems. Finally, there were popular romances, such as the novels of Ouida, which Mrs. Cather liked.

Fairly recent novels such as Anna Karenina, one of Cather's favorites, probably came from the drugstore where she worked and took her pay in merchandise. She was fourteen, she remembered, when paperbound copies of Tolstoy, rendered into indifferent English, fell into her hands: Anna Karenina, The Cossacks,"The Death of Ivan Ilych," and "The Kreutzer Sonata." For three years, she said later with characteristic exaggeration, she read Tolstoy all the time, backward and forward. What she wanted at that age was vitality. She wanted to read about life, about characters who were in the midst of struggle. She did not pay any attention to style or form. She wanted color; she wanted to be thrilled; she wanted excitement.

Some of the books that she collected into her own library also have survived. They are all carefully labeled "Private Library" and numbered. The earliest dated volume in the group is a battered copy of the Iliad in Pope's translation with the year 1888 inside the cover and the number 70. Other titles of the same period are Jacob Abbot's Histories of Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great, George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Alexander Winchell's Sketches of Creation, a paperback edition of Antony and Cleopatra, and Pilgrim's Progress, the book she first encountered when Grandma Boak had read it to her in Virginia. She later told Edith Lewis that she had read it eight times during one of her first winters in Nebraska. She also must have had a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which came out the year the Cathers moved to Red Cloud. In the thirties she reported rereading that novel for what she thought was the twentieth time.

She certainly was drawing on her own memories of childhood reading when she wrote a book column in Pittsburgh in 1897. Then she recommended "that dear old book" The Count of Monte Cristo and another favorite, Dinah Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman. She also included, with Pilgrim's Progress, a second book "essential to a child's library," The Swiss Family Robinson. "Any child who has not read these has missed a part of his or her childhood." And she added to the list the works of Howard Pyle, especially Otto of the Silver Hand, from which a child could get a "very fair idea [of] what that phrase 'the Middle Ages' meant." Pyle remained one of her heroes, and even before she met him later as a co-worker on McClure's Magazine, she sent him a copy of The Troll Garden, inscribed as follows: "Will Mr. Howard Pyle accept through me the love of seven big and little children to whom he taught the beauty of language and of line, and to whom, in a desert place, he sent the precious message of Romance."

Outside of her formal education and her leisure reading a number of Red Cloud people contributed to the growth of her mind. Her fondness for visiting the immigrant farm women on the Divide already has been noted, and she sought out interesting adults wherever she could find them. Like Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark, she had many adult friends. Dr. McKeeby, the family physician, was a particular one. He pulled her through a childhood illness that may have been polio (though if it was, she was left with no paralysis), much as Dr. Archie ministers to young Thea in the novel. Dr. McKeeby looked after the entire family for many years and was no doubt partly responsible for Cather's early ambition to study medicine. In pursuit of this interest she often went on calls with Dr. McKeeby and later put him into The Song of the Lark as the childhood friend and subsequent sponsor of the heroine's artistic career. Cather also made calls with another Red Cloud physician, Dr. Robert Damerell, and on one occasion she administered choloroform while the doctor amputated a boy's leg. Cather told an interviewer years later: "How I loved the long rambling buggy rides we used to take . . . . We went over the same roads this summer [1921]. I could tell who lived at every place and all about the ailments of his family. The old country doctor and I used to talk over his cases. I was determined then to be a surgeon."

Her interest in adults is well illustrated in "Two Friends," one of the stories in Obscure Destinies. Based on a childhood memory, the tale is narrated by a young girl who hangs about the general store to hear Mr. Dillon and Mr. Trueman talk. She liked to listen to those two because their talk was the only interesting conversation in the town. The older men always talked about politics and business—nothing else—and the young men's talk was empty-headed and supposed to be funny, but she found it utterly boring and banal. It was scarcely speech, she remembered, but noises, snorts, giggles, yawns, and sneezes, with a few abbreviated words and slang expressions. Mr. Dillon, the banker and proprietor of the general store, and Mr. Trueman, a cattleman, sat out each night in spring and summer on the boardwalk that ran along the long brick wall of Dillon's store and carried on their conversations.

She also liked the store and the brick wall and the sidewalk because they were solid and well built, and admired Dillon and Trueman for the same reason. They were secure and established, and they talked about everything—crops and the farmers they dealt with, trips they had taken, plays they had seen. Their talk was a window on a larger world. She found many pretexts for lingering near them, and they never seemed to mind her hanging about. She would sit on the edge of the sidewalk with her feet hanging down playing jacks. In the story the two friends finally split over the issue of William Jennings Bryan and free silver, something that could not have happened until after Cather had left Nebraska, but in real-life they were Mr. Richardson and Mr. Miner, the latter a neighbor of the Cathers and owner of the general store where young Willa did indeed hang about a great deal. Whether there is any basis in fact for the story, other than the conversations and the friendship, the record does not say.

Another of the girl's adult friends was William Ducker, an educated Englishman who was perhaps the most important influence of all her "friends of childhood." Ducker came to Red Cloud the year after the Cathers and clerked in his brother's store. He was generally regarded by his family as a failure, but that did not seem to bother him. He had a passionate interest in Latin, Greek, and science, and soon after he arrived Cather sought him out and began reading the classics with him. She was already studying Latin and probably began the study of Greek at this time. Under his guidance she read Virgil, Ovid, the Iliad, and the Odes of Anacreon; and after she went to the university, where she continued her Latin and Greek, she read with him during the summers. They also had long talks together about good and evil, life and death, and all the big questions. Ducker understood and valued his pupil and left an indelible memory. He also fueled her interest in science by inviting her to help him conduct experiments in a laboratory he built in his house. But the relationship ended abruptly during her second summer home from the university. One afternoon she was walking home with him from his brother's store when he said,"It is just as though the light were going out, Willie." A few minutes after she had left him, one of his children came running after her to call her back. She returned to find him dead on the couch of his living room with a copy of the Iliad open on the floor beside him. This death was the first great loss of her life.

Her lifelong devotion to the classics, which began during her Red Cloud adolescence, was paralleled by an absorbing interest in music. The person most responsible for this interest was Mrs. Julia Miner, whose husband was the Mr. Dillon of "Two Friends." Mrs. Miner had been born in Christiana (now Oslo), the daughter of the oboe soloist in Ole Bull's Royal Norwegian Orchestra. As a child she had gone to rehearsals and concerts and studied music, and when the vicissitudes of life made her the wife of a Nebraska merchant, she installed a new Chickering piano in her Red Cloud parlor and continued her music. When Mrs. Miner played for her own children, she gave Willa her first experience of serious music. Young Cather loved to listen to her play and to hear about her musical childhood in Norway.

The importance of Mrs. Miner in Cather's life is clearly discernible in My Ántonia, where she appears as Jim Burden's neighbor Mrs. Harling: "Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house . . . . Her face was rosy and solid, with bright, twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul." Jim liked to cross the street to the Harlings' house because it always was a gay, noisy place except when Mr. Harling was home. Someone was always at the piano. Julia practiced regularly every day. Frances played when she came home from her job in her father's store. Sally played after she got home from school, and even Nina, the youngest, played. Jim recalls:"Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she managed to practise every day. I soon learned that if I were sent over on an errand and found Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait quietly until she turned to me." He remembered her vividly as she played—a short, square person planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands moving quickly and neatly over the keys while her eyes were fixed on the music with intelligent concentration. Mrs. Miner died while My Ántonia was being written, and when Cather wrote Carrie Miner Sherwood a letter of condolence, she said she had tried hard to recall certain tricks of voice and gesture in creating Mrs. Harling. Her character, she said, was a clear little snapshot of Mrs. Miner as she first remembered her, and she added that there had been a little of Mrs. Miner in almost every mother she ever had done.

The Miner daughters, who were Cather's childhood companions, became lifelong friends. Mary, who appears in My Ántonia as Julia,"the musical one," and Carrie, the older one who worked in the store, remained in Red Cloud, and Cather visited them during her many trips back to Nebraska in later years. Irene, little Nina in the book, married and moved to Chicago. Her home became a stopping point for Cather between New York and Red Cloud. She corresponded regularly with both Carrie and Irene, and the dedication of My Ántonia is to "Carrie and Irene Miner / In memory of affections old and true." The Miner household was also of singular importance in another respect, for there Cather met Annie Sadilek, who came in from the farm to work as a hired girl for the Miners and remained her friend for life. Thirty years later she sat for the portrait of Ántonia Shimerda in what many think is Cather's best novel.

Despite the fact that Cather developed a passion for music, she had no formal music education and did not even try to learn to play the piano. Jennie Cather hired an itinerant German music teacher named Schindelmeisser to give her daughter lessons, but the effort was a failure. Harmony, counterpoint, the technical mastery of an instrument, held no attraction for her. Music to her was an emotional release, not an intellectual exercise. She nearly drove her teacher mad when he tried to give her lessons, and when Schindelmeisser told Mrs. Cather that she was wasting her money, she told him to keep coming. Her daughter, she said, was getting a lot out of listening to him play and talking to him about his musical life in the old country.

This alcoholic, derelict musician made a lasting impression, for he became Professor Wunsch in The Song of the Lark, the teacher who gives Thea Kronborg her first music lessons and bequeaths to her his cherished score of Orfeo and the desire to become an artist. "Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and bearlike about his shoulders. His face was a dark, bricky red, deeply creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was like loose leather over his neckband—he wore a brass collar button but no collar. His hair was cropped close; iron-gray bristled on a bullet-like head. His eyes were always suffused and bloodshot. He had a coarse, scornful mouth, and irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges. His hands were square and red, seldom clean, but always alive, impatient, even sympathetic." The actual Schindelmeisser had wandered into Red Cloud "from God knew where," and Mrs. Miner, who recognized in him a first-rate musician, had engaged him to teach her daughters. If he could not get young Cather to practice her scales, he, like the fictional Wunsch, must nevertheless have left something important in his talks with his pupil. In her later career as music critic and creator of fictional musicians Cather relied on instinct, intuition, and feeling to get her through.

Cather's adult friends certainly knew that she was a remarkable girl, but the average Red Cloud resident probably thought of her as that "show-off" tomboy Cather youngster. She was not disposed to conceal her talents during her Red Cloud years, and she must have been rather conspicuous in that small community. Half a century later she would go to any length to avoid publicity, but as an adolescent she was gregarious and fond of people. She was conspicuous not only because of her natural gifts, but also because she developed a wide streak of nonconformity. The long hair that Vickie Templeton wears in "Old Mrs. Harris" was not Willa Cather's hairstyle. Before she was thirteen she had cut her hair shorter than most boys and was signing her name William Cather, Jr., or Wm. Cather, M.D. She expressed a vast contempt for skirts and dresses, wore boys' clothes, a derby, and carried a cane. She wrote in a friend's album that slicing toads was her hobby, doing fancy work a real misery, and amputating limbs perfect happiness. Such a child must have taken her knocks from the local busybodies.

For several years, until after Cather left Red Cloud to attend the University of Nebraska, she defied Victorian norms of behavior for adolescent girls. Her goal in life was to become a surgeon, but that option was not open to girls, or so she must have thought, living in a little prairie town. As a result, she refused to be a girl, adopted male values and attitudes, and continued the tomboy life she had led in her prepubescent years in Virginia and on the farm at Catherton. Her father was always indulgent, and her mother, who no doubt deplored the male masquerade, nevertheless let her develop in her own way. What effect this denial of her sex had on her psychological development, her sexual orientation, and her life as an artist is a matter of considerable interest. Contemporary readers, especially feminist critics, have speculated at length on these matters. Did this pattern of adolescent behavior foreshadow, as some critics think, a latent or covert lesbianism? Did it make inevitable her remaining single, her selection of women as her closest friends, her creation of strong, resourceful heroines? Did it produce the large number of unhappy marriages in her fiction? Did it engender a fear of sex? Available data give no objective answers.

Cather's contempt for the role an adolescent girl was expected to play—learning to cook and sew, keep house, and care for children—may be seen in the way she contrasts the immigrant farm girls with the town girls in My Ántonia. The farm girls, who worked in the fields like men, were strong, vigorous, alive; and when they came to town to live, they developed a "positive carriage and freedom of movement" that "made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women . . . . physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families . . . . they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes." Their muscles seemed to ask only not to be disturbed.

Cather's youthful identification with male norms is further illustrated in an autobiographical story published the year after she graduated from college. Here she creates a very masculine young woman as protagonist in "Tommy, the Unsentimental" and places her tale in a town like Red Cloud. Tommy, who has a head for business and saves a run on a bank with a twenty-five-mile whirlwind bike ride, is a crony of her father's business friends. "She was just one of them; she played whist and billiards with them, and made their cocktails for them, not scorning to take one herself occasionally." She also is described as having "a peculiarly unfeminine mind that could not escape meeting and acknowledging a logical conclusion." In contrast with the masculine Tommy is Jessica, Tommy's girlfriend and rival,"a dainty, white, languid bit of a thing, who used violet perfumes and carried a sunshade." In the story's denouement Tommy tells her effete, ineffectual boyfriend Jay to marry Jessica:"We have been playing a nice little game, and now it's time to quit . . . . She's your kind."

When Cather was thirteen, a political skirmish took place in Red Cloud involving her father and some of her adult friends. Dr. McKeeby had been elected mayor and Charles Cather alderman. When the county treasurer was accused of misappropriating public funds, Willa's father was put on a committee to investigate. Dr. McKeeby, Charles Wiener, James Miner, and Silas Garber, all backing Charles Cather, carried on a running battle in the local press with supporters of the treasurer. This spectacle of grass-roots politicking, which young Cather observed firsthand, may have inspired the children in the neighborhood to enact a juvenile version of local government.

The result was the construction of a play town called "Sandy Point," built of packing boxes from the Miners' store along the south fence of the Cather yard under cottonwood and wild plum trees. Charles Cather ordered several loads of sand, which Willa's brothers shoveled out to make a main street, and each child set up shop in one of the boxes. Willa was elected mayor. Margie Miner was an alderman; Jessica Cather was postmistress; Mary Miner kept a candy shop; another child ran a hotel in a piano box. They carried on transactions with Confederate money the Cathers had brought from Virginia. This childhood playtime is commemorated in one of Cather's early stories,"The Way of the World" (1896), in which an all-boys town of packing boxes is invaded by Mary Eliza Jenkins. Mary Eliza—who pesters the boys to be admitted to their community until they give in, against their better judgment—takes over the town, sows dissension in the ranks, and then decamps. The story no doubt owes something to Tom Sawyer, but it anticipates interestingly the child's world of Crane's Whilomville Stories and Tarkington's Penrod. The ironic tone of the narrative never gets serious, but the comparison of Mary Eliza's machinations to Eve's role in man's fall suggests Cather's continuing distrust of her sex.

For any child of energy, imagination, and intelligence, drama offers a natural outlet. As soon as the family moved into town, young Cather began to take part in amateur theatricals. The Red Cloud Argus reported on May 14, 1885, that the Sunday school concert at the Baptist church had featured Miss Willie Cather, who "electrified the audience with elocutionary powers." And the following month there was a similar item. The performance perhaps was her rendition of Hiawatha, which she was in the habit of giving in a costume complete with bow and arrow. By the time she was thirteen, she was making up and staging her own plays in the upstairs attic and in the Miners' parlor. When she was fourteen, she and the Miner girls put on a play in the new opera house for the benefit of the victims of the blizzard of '88. They presented Beauty and the Beast, with Margie Miner as the beauty, Mary Miner as the beast, and Willie Cather, dressed in suit, hat, and waxed mustache, as the merchant-father. The Red Cloud Chief was much impressed with her performance. It was characteristic that she should have played a male role, which she did again when she dressed in black velvet knee pants and appeared as the old alchemist in the Merchants' Carnival. She represented Cook's drugstore, where she sometimes worked.

The opera house was perhaps the one place in town that held the most attraction for Cather. There she was introduced to the world of the theater, and though the quality of the road shows that visited Red Cloud must have been mediocre, the memory of plays and light operas there was golden. She wrote in 1929 that "half a dozen times during each winter . . . a traveling stock company settled down at the local hotel and thrilled and entertained us for a week." It was a wonderful week for the children. The excitement began when the advance man posted the bills on the lumberyard fence and the windows of the drug and grocery stores. Cather and her friends used to stand for hours studying every word on the posters and trying to decide whether they could get their parents to let them go every other night or just on opening and closing nights. No child ever got to go every night unless his father owned stock in the opera house. If the company arrived at night, she continued,"My chums and I always walked a good half mile to the depot . . . to see that train come in . . . . We found it delightful to watch a theatrical company alight, pace the platform while their baggage was being sorted, and then drive off—the men in the hotel bus, the women in the 'hack.' If by any chance one of the show ladies carried a little dog with a blanket on, that simply doubled our pleasure." Then the children invented pretexts to visit the hotel to see the actors lounging about.

One particular production that she recalled was Frank Lindon's performance in The Count of Monte Cristo: "When old Frank Lindon in a frilled shirt and a velvet coat blazing with diamonds, stood in the drawing room of Mme. Danglars' and revealed his identity to Mme. de Morcery, his faithless Mercedes, when she cowered and made excuses, and he took out a jeweled snuff box with a much powdered hand, raised his eyebrows, permitted his lip to curl, and said softly and bitterly, 'a fidelity of six months!' then we children were not in the opera house in Red Cloud; we were in Mme. Danglars' salon in Paris in the middle of lives so very different from our own. Living people were making us feel things, and it is through the feelings, not at all through the eyes, that one's imagination is fired . . . . It did us good to weep at 'East Lynne,' even if the actress was fairly bad and the play absurd. Children have about a hundred years of unlived life wound up in them, and they want to be living some of it."

Cather lived intensively during her high school years. When she wasn't doing her homework, reading the classics with Will Ducker, staging plays in the attic, or making calls with Drs. McKeeby and Damerell, she was writing up high school news for the Argus. She used her father's office while he was at the courthouse making title abstracts or out of town on business. She had her own desk where she wrote and studied. People of the community who came in to do business with her father often stayed to talk to her. They would tell her of "personal affairs in the way that grown-ups will disclose to a child matters which they would not discuss with a mature person." All these experiences, plus her incessant reading, prepared her mind for her future vocation.

She also was accumulating memories and experiences in the countryside surrounding Red Cloud. There were picnics in the fine cottonwood grove adjacent to Governor Garber's house; there were visits to Uncle George's farm at Catherton; there were outings at the Miners' ranch southwest of town, which still had a well-preserved sod house on the property. The most exciting place of all was the Republican River, just outside of town, and in particular one spot in the river known as Far Island. "Far Island is an oval sand bar, half a mile in length and perhaps a hundred yards wide, which lies about two miles up from Empire City in a turbid little Nebraska river." Such is the opening sentence of a story,"The Treasure of Far Island," published in 1902. The children, especially Willa and her brothers Roscoe and Douglass, loved that island, and there they played Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins, for Treasure Island, one of their favorite books, had appeared in 1883. They camped on the island and built their fires on the dazzling, white, ripplemarked sandy beach. The center of the island was thick with thousands of yellow-green willows and cottonwood seedlings, brilliantly green even in the hottest summer weather. The island was no-man's-land, but every summer a new chief claimed it, and Cather's memory also kept a tight hold on it. The island appears not only in "The Treasure of Far Island," but also in one of her most successful early stories,"The Enchanted Bluff" (1909). In the latter the boys of the town camp on the island during the last night of summer vacation. They are about to scatter for good, and the male narrator soon will leave to begin teaching school. As they lie on the sand looking up at the stars, they plan someday to climb the Enchanted Bluff somewhere down in New Mexico. The narrator of the tale wakes early the next morning, and as he looks at the other sleeping boys, he thinks of their aspirations. "It was still dark, but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like crystal globes and trembled as if they shone through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it was gone." So were youth and the young days on Far Island. In her first book, April Twilights (1903), the dedicatory poem, addressed to her brothers Roscoe and Douglass, recalls
the three who lay and planned at moonrise,
On an island in a western river,
Of the conquest of the world together.

Those golden days ended for Cather in June 1890, when she graduated from high school and prepared to enter the university at Lincoln. Her childhood was over, though she was only sixteen and a half. The bright Medusa was drawing her from the anonymity of the prairie town to a larger world of striving and achievement. Her parting message to Red Cloud, which both attracted and repelled her, was her graduation speech,"Superstition versus Investigation." She was one of three graduates that year, the second class to finish Red Cloud High School. Her remarks followed those of John Tulleys, who discoursed on "Self-Advertising," and Alex Bently, who asserted that "New Times Demand New Measures and New Men." Young Tulleys believed "a man should blow his own trumpet and the louder and longer he can blow the deeper impression he will make . . . . Taking by any means as a motto, a shrewd man will succeed in any business"—and on and on he went, sounding like a preview of Cather's money-grubbing Bayless Wheeler in One of Ours or the opportunistic Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady. The reporter for the Red Cloud Chief thought that John would "make his way to fame" and that Alex also would go far; but he was silent about the prospects of Willa Cather.

Her oration, however, is a remarkable performance for a youngster of her time and place. Although the Chief did not predict a bright future, it did publish her speech, which was obviously an answer to the small-town critics who had criticized her interests in biology, medicine, and vivisection. It is a ringing defense of scientific inquiry and ranges from the dawn of history to the present moment. As Jim Burden says of his high school graduation oration in My Ántonia, "It stated with fervor a great many things I had lately discovered." This essay, which never before has been reprinted in full, is her first extant piece of serious writing. It antedates by nearly a year the well-known Carlyle essay that bowled over her English teacher in Lincoln:

All human history is a record of an emigration, an exodus from barbarism to civilization. From the very outset of this pilgrimage of humanity, superstition and investigation have been contending for the mastery. Since investigation first led man forth on that great search for truth which has prompted all his progress, superstition, the stern Pharoah of his former bondage, has followed him retarding every step of advancement.

Then began a contest which will end only with time, for it is the warfare between radicalism and conservatism, truth and error, which underlies every man's life and happiness. The ancient Orientals were highly civilized people but were dreamers and theorists who delved into the mystical and metaphysical, leaving the more practical questions unanswered, and were subject to the evils of tyranny and priestcraft. Those sacred books of the east we today regard as half-divine. We are not apt to think as we read those magnificent flights of metaphor that the masses of the people who read and believed them knew nothing of figures. It is the confounding of the literal and the figurative that has made atheists and fanatics throughout the ages.

All races have worshipped nature, the ruder as the cause, the more enlightened as the effect of one grand cause. Worship as defined by Carlyle is unmeasured wonder, but there are two kinds of wonder, that born of fear and that of admiration, slavish fear is never reverence.

The Greeks, lacking the intense religious fervor of the Orient, entertained broader views. Their standard of manhood was one of practical worth. They allowed no superstition, religious, political or social, to stand between them and the truth and suffered exile, imprisonment and death for the right of opinion and investigation.

Perhaps the strongest conflict ever known between the superstitious and investigative forces of the world raged in the dark ages. Earth seemed to return to its original chaotic state and there was no one to cry "fiat lux." The old classic creeds fell crashing into the boundless past and the new church was a scene of discord. All the great minds were crushed, for men were still ruled by the iron scepter of fear and it was essential that they should remain ignorant. 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 scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery. When we are mortal [morbid?] enough to say that the world degenerates with the age, we forget that the heroes and sages of history were the exceptions and not the rule. What age since the world's foundation can leave such a record across the paper [pages?] of time as the 19th century? What is it that characterizes our age and gives the present the superiority; not skill in handicraft, for the great masters of art lie sleeping among the founders of Attica and Italy; not in clearness of depth of thought, for our literary or philosophical lights are gleams from the fires of the past. In the Elizabethan age, a book was written asserting that nature is the only teacher, that no man's mind is broad enough to invent a theory to hold nature, for she is the universe. With the publication of the Novum Organum came a revolution in thought; scientists ceased theorizing and began experimenting. Thus we went painfully back to nature, weary and disgusted with our artificial knowledge, hungering for that which is meat, thirsting for that which is drink, longing for the things that are. She has given us the universe in answer.

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, as it must precede all progress; and yet upon every hand we hear the objections to its pursuit. The boy who spends his time among the stones and flowers is a trifler, and if he tries with bungling attempt to pierce the mystery of animal life, he is cruel. Of course if he becomes a great anatomist or a brilliant naturalist, his cruelties are forgotten or forgiven him; the world is very cautious, but it is generally safe to admire a man who has succeeded. We do not withhold from a few great scientists the right of the hospital, the post mortem or experimenting with animal life, but we are prone to think the right of experimenting with life too sacred a thing to be placed in hands of inexperienced persons. Nevertheless, if we bar our novices from advancement, whence shall come our experts?

But to test the question by comparison, would all the life destroyed in experimenting from the beginning of the world until today be as an atom to the life saved by that one grand discovery for which Harvey sacrificed his practice and his reputation, the circulation of the blood? There is no selfishness in this. It came from a higher motive than the desire for personal gain, for it too often brings destitution instead. Of this we have a grand example in the broken-down care-worn old man who has just returned from the heart of the Dark Continent. But perhaps you still say that I evade the question; has anyone a right to destroy life for scientific purposes? Ah, why does life live upon death throughout the universe?

Investigators have styled fanatics those who seek to probe into the mysteries of the unknowable. This is unreasonable. The most aspiring philosopher never hoped to do more than state the problem; he never dreamed of solving it. Newton did not say how or why every particle of matter in the universe attracted every other particle of matter in the universe. He simply said it was so. We can only judge these abstract forces by their effect. Our intellectual swords may cut away a thousand petty spiderwebs woven by superstition across the mind of man, but before the veil of the "Sanctum Sanctorum" we stand confounded; our blades glance and turn and shatter upon the eternal adamant. Microscopic eyes have followed matter to the molecule and fallen blinded. Imagination has gone a step farther and grasped the atom. There, with a towering height above and yawning death below even this grows sick at soul. For over six thousand years we have shaken fact and fancy in the dice box together and breathlessly awaited the result. But the dice of God are always loaded, and there are two sides which never fall upward, the alpha and omega. Perhaps when we make our final cast with dark old death, we may shape them better.

From June to September Cather was getting ready to go to college. Finding money to finance her education was difficult, as it is for Vickie Templeton in "Old Mrs. Harris." Charles Cather, who was land poor and now had six children to support, had to borrow money from a business associate, but both parents knew that their daughter wanted above all else to get an education. In the story the money is loaned by Mr. Rosen, the neighbor/merchant, who sends Vickie off to college with a quotation from the French historian Michelet written "on a sheet of purple paper, in his delicately shaded foreign script: 'Le but n'est rien; le chemin, c'est tout.'" That means, he tells her, "The end is nothing; the road is all. Let me write it down for you and give you your first French lesson." This observation became a precept that she carried through life. She often quoted it, and when she reached the striving novelist's goal of fame and affluence, Michelet's truth haunted her.

CHAPTER 4

University Days

Lincoln, the state capital, was not a large city by any absolute standard when Cather got off the train at the Burlington depot in September 1890. But it was eighteen times the size of Red Cloud and by comparison a metropolis. She never had lived in a city, and the prospect was exciting. Although she was later to evoke the soil of Webster County in unforgettable prose, she took to the city life avidly, and later when the chance came to move on to Pittsburgh, she did not hesitate. Still later she moved on to New York with the same alacrity and made her home there for the rest of her life. Lincoln, however, was her first encounter with urban life.

The Nebraska capital then had a population of thirty-five thousand sprawled over several square miles of flat, open prairie in the typical mid-western pattern of city planning: perfectly rectangular blocks laid out by theodolite and surveyors' chains in a north-south, east-west grid. Lettered streets ran east and west, numbered streets north and south. The capitol building stood at the center, and a mile north, at the top of Eleventh Street were the buildings of the university. By the time Cather arrived, eight miles of streets had been paved with red cedar blocks and brick; the inhabitants had ridden in horse cars for seven years, had possessed a waterworks for five, gas streetlights for four; and the telephone company had 615 subscribers. The first skyscraper, the six-story Burr Block, was finished the year before Cather came; there were five major hotels, about as many saloons as churches, five private schools, a public library, and an electric-light plant. Shade trees had had a quarter of a century to establish themselves, but the city still had a raw look about it. Outside of town there were people still lining in dugouts, and some years when the grasshopper plague hit the neighboring farms, the insects stripped the young trees of the city. The smell of burning prairie grass often drifted over the city before it was replaced by progress and industrial fumes as the city grew.

The founders of the city "were the pioneers not of land but of commerce and the professions: judges, lawyers, merchants, publishers, railroad builders, professors. There were also the exploiters, the boomers of paper towns and promoters of wildcat banks. But good or bad, they did not come to Nebraska to build a different world; they wanted the kind of society they had always considered desirable—but they wanted it here, where success (so they thought) was quick as a grasshopper and sure as the wind." Many were disappointed, however, and when depression hit the state in the mid-nineties, they wished they were back where they came from.

Life in Lincoln was not primitive. The settlers from the East had not been in contact with the frontier long enough to be influenced by the wild land. They built the same square brick piles they had formerly lived in or constructed the frame houses ornamented with turrets, bulbous pillars, and other Victorian gimcracks. They brought their eastern culture and artifacts with them, and while they were digging up the buffalo grass to plant their lawns and flowerbeds, they were unpacking their Limoges china, Landseer lithographs, and Ticknor and Fields books. Lincoln was an instant city built like a movie set. It had been empty prairie in 1867 when Nebraska became a state, and it was a thriving city twenty-three years later, nearly tripling in size between 1880 and 1890. It quickly became a railroad center, as it was on the direct route between Chicago and Denver, and by the end of the century nineteen different rail lines led into it. This fact is important for Cather's career, because it made Lincoln a convenient stop for first-rate theatrical and musical companies on their way to Denver and San Francisco. When Cather became drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal, she was able to review plays and musical events of major importance.

Lincoln at this time had two thriving theaters, the Lansing and the Funke, both large and well appointed. Together they could accommodate three thousand spectators, and when both were open sometimes one hundred traveling companies passed through Lincoln in one year. Often there were five or six plays a week, and one could see Julia Marlowe, Helena Modjeska, Margaret Mather, Richard Mansfield, the Drews, Otis Skinner, and many others. Symphony orchestras and opera companies with internationally acclaimed singers also passed through the city. Discouraged Bohemian farmers like Mr. Shimerda may have been blowing their brains out on the bleak, lonely prairie of Webster County, but in Lancaster County there were people in top hats and tails eating oysters shipped in from the East in blocks of ice and sipping French champagne at their after-theater parties.

The University of Nebraska was about the same age as Lincoln. Its buildings were laid out on four city blocks, neatly planted in grass and new trees and surrounded by a high iron fence. The largest building was University Hall, an ornate red-brick structure dominating the campus. "There before me," wrote Alvin Johnson, one of Cather's contemporaries,"was University Hall, as it was pictured in the university catalogue. I walked up to the gate, where I was almost trodden down by students scurrying from the classrooms. The building before me seemed huge and majestic. It had four strata of windows, some of them lighted, under a mansard roof. The building was topped with a square tower. To the right were three other buildings of varying architecture, all handsome to my country eyes." The library was housed in two crowded rooms, and although a separate library building was begun in 1893, it remained an empty, unfinished shell until the legislature appropriated money to complete it after Cather graduated.

The student population then was three or four hundred (with another one hundred in the prep school), but by the time Cather left, three times that many were straining the capacity of the physical plant. Jim Burden remembered the student body: "In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had come up to the university from the farms and the little towns scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice."

The university already had attracted some prominent scholars and had begun giving graduate work in some disciplines. Cather is not very accurate when she has Jim Burden recall: "Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools." But Jim's following statement is correct enough: "There was an atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before."

Johnson remembers that it was the "chief mission of the university, as we saw it, to train young men and women and send them out to man the grade schools and eventually the high schools . . . . The older members of the faculty conceived of teaching Nebraskans as their essential function in life. Many of them had been students at the university in its early years and had risen through instructorships to the professorial ranks. Others had been drawn from neighboring institutions of the prairie states."

In addition to the homegrown talent, however, was imported scholarship and learning, like the city's imported oysters and champagne from the East and Europe. Bernice Slote says: "The University of Nebraska in the early 1890's was itself a little Renaissance world." There was A. H. Edgren from Sweden, translator of Sanskrit, former rector of the University of Gothenberg; James T. Lees, who taught Greek, a great scholar, British-born but educated at Johns Hopkins under the famous classicist Basil Gildersleeve; Herbert Bates, young poet and fiction writer who had studied under Barrett Wendell at Harvard. Roscoe Pound, who later became dean of the Harvard Law School, was both lawyer and a graduate teaching assistant in botany; John J. Pershing, later commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, was a teacher of math and military science. The chancellor was James Canfield, later president of Ohio State University and librarian of Columbia University.

This community of scholars produced some distinguished graduates, besides Willa Cather, during the nineties. Louise Pound, the sister of Roscoe, became a famous scholar and folklorist and the first woman president of the Modern Language Association. Alvin Johnson went on to found the New School for Social Research in New York. D. N. Lehmer became a well-known composer and mathematician; Hartley Burr Alexander became an important philosopher, educator, and writer, and an associate editor of Webster's New International Dictionary. William Linn Westermann had a distinguished career as an ancient historian. There also was Dorothy Canfield, daughter of the chancellor, who, though still in high school in Cather's day, was destined to be a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist.

The girl who left Red Cloud to begin the next great adventure must have been much like Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. As Thea sat in her Pullman car watching the cornfields flash by en route to Chicago to study music, it was herself and her own adventure that mattered. "If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on. Thea was surprised that she did not feel a deeper sense of loss at leaving her old life behind her." It seemed, on the contrary, as she looked out the train window,"that she had left very little. Everything that was essential seemed to be right there in the car with her." Cather had the same self-sufficiency, the same resolute determination to confront her destiny. She did not yet know what her destiny was to be, but there was no hanging back. She had wanted to go to college, and getting there had not been easy. She was going to make the most of it.

Although her father was forced to borrow money to send her, the expenses actually were modest. The three hundred dollars that Mr. Rosen lends Vickie Templeton in "Old Mrs. Harris" probably was enough to see a frugal student through two years of college. One could get room and board for three dollars a week, and the university fees consisted of a ten-dollar registration fee and a ten-dollar (refundable) chemistry breakage fee. Books and incidentals also were proportionately cheap. Once she got to Lincoln, Cather did not have to skimp. She boarded at the best eating place in town and was able to go to Omaha to the theater on occasion. She did have to tend her own stove in the rooming house, something she never had done before, but her later memories of her poverty-stricken college days are a good bit exaggerated. In 1940 she believed that no student ever had gone through college on a smaller allowance than she had. She went without some things in order to have other things she wanted, and for some of the books in her library she felt a particular affection because they were bought at the cost of considerable sacrifice during her student days.

Her memory of being poor in college applies more to her last two years than to the first two. In 1893 the nation was hit by a severe depression, and times were particularly hard in Nebraska. For several summers there were successive crop failures, and in 1893 a hot wind burned up the entire corn crop in three days. Banks failed; eastern investors withdrew their money; farm mortgages were foreclosed. The Farmers' and Merchants' Bank of Red Cloud failed, and while Charles Cather lost no money, many men who owed him money did. He owned a large amount of farm land that was heavily mortgaged and for a time was hard put to support his family. Cather's brother Roscoe did not go to college but began teaching country school at the age of sixteen to help support the family. Willa at this time became a professional journalist and for the last two years of her university career was probably self-supporting. Whether she earned enough to contribute to the family income, the record does not say; but she recognized family obligations, and later, when she was working in Pittsburgh, she sent money home. She continued to do this in New York when she worked for McClure's Magazine, and after she became a free-lance novelist, she helped put her younger brother Jack and sister Elsie through college.

Living arrangements for students in the 1890s were unorganized. Jim Burden remembers: "There were no college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could." Cather first rented a room at i1019 H Street in the home of "Aunt Kate" Hastings, a friend of the family on the edge of town near open country, and later she lived with D. Neil Johnson, a real estate broker, and his family at 1029 L Street. While she was looking for a place to live, she and her mother, who accompanied her to Lincoln, stayed with the family of R. E. Moore, head of the Security Investment Company that employed Charles Cather as its southeastern Nebraska representative. If Jim Burden's memory of his room is an accurate description of Cather's first living quarters, she got two rooms for the price of one because the house was inconveniently located for students. Her bedroom, originally a linen closet, was unheated and just big enough for a cot, and her other room she fixed up as her study."I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie." In the corner at her right she put her books on shelves she made and painted herself, and on the blank wall to the left she tacked up a large, newly purchased map of ancient Rome. Rome was the one place in all the world, she had written in her friend's album two years before, that she most wanted to visit. Over the bookcase she hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at Pompeii.

It is appropriate that Cather's alter ego narrator Jim in My Ántonia is male, for Cather was still refusing to act and dress like a girl. She continued to cut her hair short for at least her first year at the university and wore starched shirts like a man instead of feminine shirtwaists; she did put on skirts, though she wore them shorter than most women, daringly short, some of her classmates thought. She also continued taking male roles in dramatic productions and signing her name William Cather. This last went on, Louise Pound remembered, until her friends made her stop it. It was Mrs. Charles Gere, mother of one of her closest college friends and wife of the publisher of the Journal, who persuaded her to let her hair grow. Years later when Mrs. Gere died, Cather wrote Mariel Gere that her mother had done so much for a clumsy country girl. She had done it simply by being her lovely and gracious self; her charm and vivacity were something entirely new. No one but Mrs. Gere, she said, could have persuaded her to let her hair grow or to learn to spell. William Westermann recalled her first appearance in the elementary Greek class that he was enrolled in. While the students were awaiting the instructor, the door opened, and a head with short hair and a straw hat appeared. A masculine voice inquired if this were the beginning Greek class, and when someone said it was, the body attached to the head and hat opened the door wider and came in. The masculine head and voice were attached to a girl's body and skirts. The entire class laughed, but Cather, apparently unperturbed, took her seat and joined the waiting students.

Cather's fellow students remembered her well. When some of them were asked for their recollections soon after she died, they recalled her mannish attire, short hair, and independent manner. One remembered that she wore high, stiff collars, string or four-in-hand ties, and mannish white cuff's that stuck out of her jacket sleeves. "I never remember her wearing a dress at any time—always dark, man-tailored suits." But another recalled that she always dressed in middy blouses with full skirts that freed her from the restraints of clothes worn by most of the women of that day. This fashion, which she probably adopted in the latter part of her college years, was a style she liked throughout her later years. A third contemporary said Cather was the first woman she ever saw wearing suspenders, and a fourth remembered that the boys who dated her were scared off after one date. She modified her behavior during her college years, however, and by the time she was a junior she was doing her hair up, no doubt to the relief of her mother; her graduation picture shows her wearing a very feminine full-length dress with puff sleeves and long gloves.

Cather was a controversial figure in college, as she had been in high school, and her classmates either were fond of her or detested her. There seems to have been little middle ground. Her own memory of herself in college was not a pleasant one. Edith Lewis reports that in one of her letters to Mrs. Goudy there was a touching note of self-questioning, "touching because of its absolute candour; humble, and at the same time fearless. She believed in the power she felt in herself, but she had no soaring illusions about it." When one of her old schoolmates, Ned Abbott, proposed writing a biographical piece on her in 1921, she told him she hated biography because no biographical sketch is thought interesting unless the subject is presented as a freak. The external queerness of a person is seldom his or her reality, she wrote. But she told Abbott to go see Mrs. Goudy, who had known her intimately during her university days and who could tell him more about her than she could. Cather told Abbott she had assumed various poses in college. There are just a few rare, charming young people who are simple and natural in college, undistorted by any affectations, and she was not one of them. She often felt lonely and was very unhappy when people cut her. Underneath her sturdy independence and uncompromising nonconformity was a desire to be liked, a desire for society. When she later went to Pittsburgh to work, she went to parties, teas, and out-of-town excursions, dated, and loved the life."Gad! how we like to be liked," she wrote Mariel Gere, quoting Charles Lamb.

When Cather arrived in Lincoln, she did not become a member of the freshman class. Despite the fact that the university was small, new, and served a state full of unassimilated foreign-born, its standards were high; and rather than admit those not sufficiently prepared, the university ran a two-year preparatory Latin school in conjunction with its baccalaureate and graduate offerings. Red Cloud High School graduates did not meet all the entrance requirements, and Cather was put in the "second prep" class. This meant that she had to take an additional year of work before she could enroll as a freshman. Thus she had five years of education in Lincoln before she graduated in June 1895.

She threw herself into her schoolwork with characteristic energy and concentration. There was nothing in her personality of the easygoing ways of her southern family. While her parents liked to sit about in leisurely discussion, never in any rush to face the problems of the day, she attacked her assignments with vigor. Professor Wunsch's feelings about Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark apply equally to Cather: "It was his pupil's power of application, her rugged will, that interested him." Viola Roseboro', later her colleague on McClure's Magazine, told Edith Lewis:"If Willa Cather had been a scrub-woman, she would have scrubbed much harder than other scrub-women." No grades were kept among the registrar's records at the University of Nebraska, but Lewis reports that Cather once stood first in her Latin class of fifty-three and used to get up at five o'clock to study. Dorothy Canfield later remembered Cather as the most brilliant student the university had, while Alvin Johnson remembered Cather and Louise Pound as the two most original students during his years in Lincoln.

Cather went to the university intending to study medicine and become a doctor, but she soon switched to the humanities. There is no record of the courses she had to take during her preparatory year except that she was allowed to take freshman chemistry and received advance credit for the course. She also took an English course from Professor Ebenezer Hunt, for whom she wrote the Carlyle essay that she thought later had turned her into a writer. Hunt used to say to her, as she was fond of quoting,"Life is one damn grind, Cather." Her interest in science continued at least into the summer after her prep year, for she wrote Mrs. Goudy then that she was chiefly interested in astronomy, botany, and chemistry, and she wrote Mariel Gere one day in July that she had spent the morning dissecting frogs to study their circulatory system. But she also said that she had been studying French history and reading George Eliot.

When she did matriculate as a regular degree candidate in the fall of 1891, she took freshman math, Greek, Latin, rhetoric and was allowed to enroll in the junior-level Shakespeare course. All of these were full year courses. Math nearly proved her undoing. She could not pass the course in her freshman year, and it was not until the second semester of her senior year that she completed freshman math and was able to graduate. She continued Latin and Greek in her sophomore year, and in her junior year took three semesters of Greek, including a course in lyric poetry. In her other Greek courses she read Pindar, Herodotus, Homer, and the dramatists. She took a lot of English literature—fifteen semesters—during her entire undergraduate program: four semesters of Shakespeare, a semester of other Elizabethan dramatists, a year of Browning, a year of other writers (Tennyson, Emerson, Ruskin, Hawthorne), a course called dramatization, and Anglo-Saxon literature. In her last two years she studied French and German, carrying four semesters of the former, in which she read Daudet, Gautier, Balzac, Racine, Taine, and two semesters of the latter. In addition she took American and European history and philosophy. Her superior ability is shown on her transcript by the notation that she was allowed to substitute advanced classes in English literature for the introductory ones. For the first two years she studied hard, but by her third year she was working nearly full-time as a journalist and getting her education outside of the classroom. She remembered that she did very little work on her courses during her last two years and passed her examinations largely on inspiration.

The major event of her first year at Lincoln occurred in March 1891, when Professor Hunt assigned a theme topic: "The Personal Characteristics of Thomas Carlyle." He originally had called for themes on Thomas Paine, but was talked out of it by timid colleagues who thought Paine too dangerous a topic to give to impressionable "second prep" students. Cather already had a passionate interest in Carlyle, owned a copy of Sartor Resartus, and the assignment sent her up like a balloon. Professor Hunt must have been astounded when he read her essay. Any English teacher who has corrected the witless humor and semiliterate prose of countless college freshmen dreams of such a moment. When Hunt handed back the papers, he wrote on the board one of the final sentences of her essay: "Like the lone survivor of some extinct species, the last of the mammoths, tortured and harassed beyond all endurance by the smaller, though perhaps more perfectly organized offspring of the world's maturer years, this great Titan, son of her passionate youth, a youth of volcanoes, and earthquakes, and great, unsystematized forces, rushed off into the desert to suffer alone."

On a Sunday morning soon afterwards Cather opened the Journal and found her essay in print. Without her knowledge Professor Hunt had given the piece to the Journal, and somehow the undergraduate publication, the Hesperian, also got a copy. Both published it on the same day. A note on the editorial page of the Journal, no doubt written by Charles Gere, the editor, called attention to the essay, the work of "a young girl sixteen [actually seventeen] years of age who comes from Webster County." He went on to say that a careful reading would "convince any student of literature that it is a remarkable production, reflecting not a little credit on the author and the university."

Thirty-six years later Cather remembered: "Up to that time I had planned to specialize in science; I thought I would like to study medicine. But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! It has a kind of hypnotic effect. I still remember that essay, and it was a splendid example of the kind of writing I most dislike; very florid and full of high-flown figures of speech." She further recalled that it did not deal at all with the personal characteristics of Carlyle but "poured out, as best I could, the feelings that a fervid reading of 'The French Revolution' and `Sartor Resartus' had stirred up in me." Yet she had to admit that the essay was honest: "Florid as it was, it didn't over color the pleasure and delightful bitterness that Carlyle can arouse in a very young person. It makes one feel so grown up to be bitter."

The mouth-filling period that Professor Hunt picked out to write on the board is perhaps the most baroque sentence in the entire essay. Although the whole composition is highly charged with the author's emotional response to Carlyle, there are many short, pithy sentences and plenty of vigorous declarative ones. What is most interesting about the piece, however, is not the rhetoric but the image of young Willa Cather projected against the figure of Thomas Carlyle. Shot through the essay are sentences more revealing of the author's dreams about herself than other subject. The personal characteristics of Carlyle are mostly those of Willa Cather, and they are characteristics that endured a lifetime.

Consider some of her observations: "He was a recluse, not that he had any aversion for men, but that he loved his books and loved Nature better." "His love and sympathy for humanity were boundless, and he understood great minds and earnest souls as no other man ever has. In this lay his power as a biographer and as a historian." "Carlyle posed but poorly as a political economist." "He went far out into one of the most desolate spots of Scotland, and made his home there. There among the wild heaths . . . he did his best work. He drew his strength from those wild landscapes." "Like Scott, he lived much in the open air." "The wife of an artist, if he continues to be an artist, must always be a secondary consideration with him." "He never strove to please a pampered public." "Nothing has so degraded modern literature as the desperate efforts of modern writers to captivate the public." "He was proud to the extreme, but his love was predominant even over his pride." "For his brother's sake he wrote for money. It seemed to him like selling his own soul. He wrote article after article for reviews, and cut up his great thoughts to fit the pages of a magazine. No wonder he hated it; it was like hacking his own flesh, bit by bit, to feed those he loved."

These quotations read like program notes for Cather's life: things she would be and do, things she was, things she would avoid. Written when she was seventeen, they show that her life patterns were drawn early. Finally, there is the most important statement of all, one that posits a lifelong conviction and a lifelong action. It comes immediately after her declaration that an artist's wife (and she meant husband too) must play a supporting role to his career. "Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so than even Jehovah. He says only, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' Art, science, and letters cry, 'Thou shalt have no other gods at all.' They accept only human sacrifices."

It is clear from a review of Cather's entire career that this creed, embraced fervently at the age of seventeen, guided her throughout her life. From the moment she decided to become a writer she devoted all her energy and intelligence to this end. Fanny Butcher, who was editor of the Chicago Tribune book section and knew Cather for thirty-five years, said she never had known anyone else who had so successfully managed to get exactly what she wanted out of life. It wasn't fame, fortune, adulation. Material possessions meant to her only what they could do to make her life unencumbered, free to write, the only thing she really wanted to do. Butcher wrote in her memoirs: "I never knew anyone who seemed to be more wrapped around by her work, to be almost encircled in it like Laocoön in the coils of the sea serpent. Once she said to me that nothing mattered to her but writing books, and living the kind of life that makes it possible to write them." Cather wrote Mariel Gere soon after beginning her new job in Pittsburgh in 1896 that there wasno god but one god and art is his revealer; that was her creed and she would follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.

The Carlyle essay was followed six months later by another remarkable performance, a long, two-part discussion entitled "Shakespeare and Hamlet," which the Journal also published. By then Cather was regularly enrolled as a freshman and taking the junior-level Shakespeare course. She also had read and pondered Shakespeare in Red Cloud, and again the essay is as much about the author and her aspirations as it is about Shakespeare and the prince of Denmark. The essay includes an inquiry into the nature of art and an analysis of what it takes to be an artist. Shakespeare as the supreme practitioner provides the inspiration for this discussion. It is as though she had made him her model. The great secret of Shakespeare's power, she wrote, was the supreme love, rather than the supreme intellect. Some writers are mere men of letters, presidents of literary clubs, and editors of magazines, but the real writers are those who have suffered the agonies of creation,"the agony in which all the forces of body, brain and soul are drawn to one vital center in the effort of one life to give individuality to a greater life, the agony of the Doric women who bore the sons of the gods." And what must an artist do to be saved? The answer she cast in the form of Christ's answer to the rich man (Luke 18:22): "Sell all that thou hast . . . and come, follow me." The mere man of letters, she wrote, like the rich man, will turn sorrowfully away. He will not give up the world to follow art.

This equating of art and religion is very characteristic of Cather. Three years later when she reviewed a superb performance by Richard Mansfield on Shakespeare's birthday, she wrote: "One felt that he was worthy to act on that might, the immortal twenty-third of April, the night on which three hundred and thirty years ago . . . God a second time turned his face in love toward man." In The Professor's House (1925) Cather has Professor St. Peter say in a lecture to his students: ""Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had." It seems clear that from 1891 on, art was to be her religion, and this single-minded pursuit of art helps to explain her subsequent life as a single artist.

By the time the Shakespeare essay appeared in print, Cather was busily engaged in extracurricular activities. A new campus magazine, the Lasso, appeared anonymously in October and November, but in December it identified James McDonald as editor and proprietor, and Willa Cather and Louise Pound as associate editors. The magazine lasted only one year, but by the beginning of her sophomore year Cather was on the staff of the oldest campus literary publication, the Hesperian. This was a combination magazine-newspaper of sixteen pages that appeared semimonthly and was published by the literary societies. Cather, who belonged to the Union Literary Society, was elected an associate editor with responsibility for the literary contents. She threw herself into this venture with characteristic energy and published four of her own stories and a short play during the first semester. Another play appeared in the winter, another story in the spring, and a sixth story the following fall.

During her junior year she became managing editor, and while she only used one of her own stories that year, she devoted a great deal of time to the magazine. One of her colleagues remembered later that "the truth is the Hesperian was Willa practically . . . . the rest of us looked wise and did nothing." The magazine had a sprightliness that year unmatched by volumes of the publication in years before and after. The first issue with "W. Cather—Managing Editor" on the masthead stated the editor's aims for the year: the Hesperian would be written "in plain, unornamented language which anyone can interpret without the aid of a handbook of mythology or a dictionary of similes." And she continued: "If there is any fighting to be done, we will be down in the line fighting on one side or the other, striking out from the shoulder. If we err, we will err through bad judgment, not through lack of enthusiasm." She also claimed the right to "pummel . . . as much as we please" any man who "says that the earth is flat, . . . slanders a great book or writes an absurd one." Finally, she promised that the paper would be decently proofread. Her greatest accomplishment of the year was in putting out a special, thirty-two-page Charter Day issue, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the university's founding.

The Hesperian was not her only extracurricular activity during her college years. She was literary editor of the 1894 Sombrero, the yearbook of her class of 1895, and apparently took part in campus debating clubs, but the record contains only secondhand references to this activity. She continued her high school interest in drama and appeared in at least two undergraduate productions. In her sophomore year she finally played a female role, appearing as Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare up to Date, a farce in which Shakespeare's characters accuse him of falsifying their true natures. During the same year she returned to her male roles as Diamond Witherspoon in a takeoff on university life thought to be written by Louise Pound. In this production Cather's recitation of "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight" brought down the house.

Cather's career as a creative writer began during her freshman year, when she wrote a story that greatly impressed her English instructor, Professor Bates. That she was seriously studying the writing process at this time is documented by Alvin Johnson's memory of her as a paper-grader when he was in the Latin school prepping for college: "I had to produce 'themes.' . . . My themes were passed on by a rather mannish young woman . . . Willa Cather. She did me the great honor of calling me to her office. 'You write not badly,' she said, 'but you don't see. Learn French, a little French and read Flaubert or even Maupassant. They see. Madame Bovary: the book is worth committing to memory."' From the beginning Flaubert was one of her masters and favorite authors. It was his painstaking attention to style and language, le mot juste, rather than his subject, that interested Cather. As her life turned out, she had a great deal in common with Flaubert: dedication to art, distrust of science, loyalty to friends, lack of interest in politics, and a desire for privacy. Neither writer ever married or thought the novel had any social purpose.

The story that delighted Herbert Bates, as the Carlyle essay had charmed Professor Hunt, was "Peter," the tale of the Bohemian immigrant who commits suicide on his Nebraska farm. Bates was so impressed that he sent story off to a Boston magazine, The Mahogany Tree, which published it in May 1892. Cather then reprinted it with revisions in the Hesperian in November. Readers will recognize the story as an early version of the episode of Mr. Shimerda's death in My Ántonia. The Bohemian musician, who has emigrated from the Old World with his wife and children, is old, feeble, dispirited, and hardly able to play his violin any longer. His practical son wants to sell the fiddle, but the old man, defeated by the hard life in the alien land and unable to part with his instrument, cannot bear to go on living: "He took Anton's shotgun down from its peg, and loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall. He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever known,'Pater noster, qui in coelum est.' . . . He held his fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe."

This is a piece of narrative that any college freshman could be proud of. Cather liked it well enough to rewrite it and republish it for a third time, in Pittsburgh eight years later. This time she dropped the thee 's and thou 's that she had used to suggest the familiar second-person singular of the Czech language, sharpened the conflict between father and son, and expanded the beginning. The bulk of the tale remained the same, however, until she reworked it into a far more intricate design in the evocative prose of My Ántonia. In this early story and the next one she wrote, she had not yet learned how to use the Nebraska setting for more than a backdrop for the action. Eventually she worked out the way to involve the land as antagonist in her prairie fiction, but here the conflict is merely between father and son.

This conflict, which is over values, is interesting, however, because it announces at the outset of her career a theme that runs significantly through her mature fiction. The tale ends with this paragraph: "In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to town the fiddlebow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been." Here already is the hard-headed, practical businessman farmer, a preview of Nat Wheeler in One of Ours (1922) or the shyster lawyer Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady (1923). The story also foreshadows the conflict between materialism and spirituality that looms large in The Professor's House (1925). The irony shown here seems remarkably sophisticated for a first story written at the age of eighteen.

Before Cather reprinted "Peter" in November, she already had used her second story,"Lou, the Prophet," in the Hesperian in October. This tale, which is just as precocious as the first one, also makes use of Nebraska material; and it too is a somber concoction of death and despair in the wild land of the Divide. Lou is a homesick Dane who has been trying to scratch a living from the recalcitrant prairie for seven years. He is rewarded for his herculean efforts by drought and crop failure, and becomes at the end a crazy religious fanatic who believes God is punishing the world for its sins. In setting this tale Cather writes: "His bill of fare never changed the year round; bread, coffee, beans and sorghum molasses, sometimes a little salt pork. After breakfast he worked until dinner time, ate, and then worked again. He always went to bed soon after the sunset, for he was always tired, and it saved oil. Sometimes, on Sundays, he would go over home after he had done his washing and house cleaning, and sometimes he hunted. His life was as sane and as uneventful as the life of his plow horses, and it was as hard and thankless." The opportunity is here to make the land the antagonist, but the story trails off into an account of Lou's religious visions and ends with his mysterious disappearance when the police come to lock him up as a dangerous lunatic.

The alchemy of time had not yet mellowed Cather's memory of the bleakness of Nebraska farm life. Her early stories of Nebraska farmers are all tales of hardship, failure, deprivation. But there is a paradox here, for her stories and her letters of this period are not of a piece. During her first summer back in Red Cloud from Lincoln she wrote of taking endless rides over the prairie, and the annual harvest was a spectacle she always loved. Another summer she wrote the Gere sisters that she wanted them to come down from Lincoln to see the country while it was looking like a garden—green and beautiful beyond words, with cornfields like forests everywhere. The tone and content of these grim early stories remind one of the tales that Hamlin Garland was writing about the same time. His bleak stories of Midwestern farm life, published as Main-Travelled Roads, had appeared in 1891. It is tempting to speculate that Cather as a college freshman thought the proper tone for a story of farmers on the prairie should be Garland's. She later repudiated these stories completely, regarded them as false pictures of the Nebraska reality, and wanted to forget them.

When Edward Wagenknecht wrote her in 1938 about her early stories, sending her a list of the ones he had uncovered, she assumed that he wanted to reprint them. She wrote him a testy letter telling him that under no circumstances could he do anything with these stories. She regarded them as quite worthless, unfit to be reprinted, and said that whenever possible she had renewed her copyrights to prevent anyone from resurrecting them. Suppose some apple grower were to pack only sound apples for market, she wrote, and suppose someone came along while he was asleep and put the bad ones left on the ground in the boxes; would that be a friendly act? Everyone has the right of supervision over their handiwork, she added. The carpenter, the dressmaker, the cabinet maker can put their flimsy work in the cellar and forget it. The copyright laws give the writer the same privilege. She was sorry her apprentice pieces still existed in the musty files of old periodicals and would have liked to destroy them all.

Four more early stories appeared in the Hesperian during 1892 and 1893. One was "The Elopement of Allen Poole," her Virginia story; two others were exercises in exoticism that led nowhere. "A Son of the Celestial" is a tale of a wise old Chinese scholar who dies in a San Francisco opium den. The anonymous narrator attacks the pretension and dusty scholarship of American professors, a covert attack on some of Cather's own teachers, no doubt, but the story is of no real importance. ""A Tale of the White Pyramid" is laid in ancient Egypt, concerns a marvelous feat of strength by an unknown youth who saves from disaster the burial ceremony of the dead Pharaoh, but the only thing of interest about this story is Cather's initial use of a first-person narrator.

The last of these stories, however, is another matter. It is even grimmer and more terrifying than "Peter" and "Lou, the Prophet." It is a grisly tale of man's inhumanity to man, in which a poor, simple-minded Russian farm worker is victimized by the society he has not asked to be part of. The character, Serge Povolitchky, is the bastard child of a Russian immigrant girl and a railroad contractor. As a farm worker on the ranch of a man with the good English name of David, Serge befriends a mongrel dog, the first thing in his life he ever has had a chance to love. The farmer in a fit of anger one day kills the dog, and Serge instantly reacts by splitting the farmer's head with an ax. In jail, Serge is too stupid to make barrel hoops and is punished by solitary confinement, tortured, and killed. "The Clemency of the Court" is the ironic title of this pathetic tale.

By the time Cather became a junior, she was no longer a docile student, and her impatience with the quality and nature of her instruction grew. Before she graduated, she quoted approvingly in her newspaper column a remark Beerbohm Tree had made in an address at Harvard. While he thought that a university education was of inestimable importance to chemists, engineers, tradesmen, and bookkeepers, Tree doubted its beneficial effect on artists. Cather was like Jim Burden, who says: "I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things." She had no sympathy with precise scholarship and said as early as the Shakespeare essay that the emotional plane of life is "infinitely higher than the intellectual," that this level was not reached by "mastering the pages of a Latin grammar." Her own criticism, which is highly emotional and impressionistic, owes its quality to her passionate commitment to the text rather than to literary analysis.

This passionate commitment was a quality that Dorothy Canfield Fisher later remembered vividly: "She amazed and sometimes abashed some of her professors by caring much more fiercely about their subjects than they did. Especially French. There seemed to be a natural affinity between her mind and French forms of art. During her undergraduate years she made it a loving duty to read every French literary masterpiece she could lay her hands on." In her French classes, though she was no doubt better read than the instructor, she had to be threatened with failing before she could be made to learn the grammar.

This antipathy for precise scholarship collided with the literary methods of the chairman of the English Department, Lucius Sherman. Though she took a number of courses from him and no doubt learned a great deal, she hated the kind of detailed literary analysis that he specialized in. He made exhaustive studies of sounds as expressions of emotions, and devised elaborate diagrams for the analysis of words. His Elements of Literature and Composition was about the dullest book Cather ever had encountered, and his Analytics of Literature she regarded as arid pedantry. Often his supposed scientific method of examining literature "came down to mere word-counting; judging by published examples, he and his students had counted words of nearly a hundred thousand sentences in works of seventy authors from Spenser to Henry James." Half of his Analytics is devoted to analysis of sentence length, comparative predication, and ratios of force, with charts, diagrams, formulae, and equations.

Cather never lost a chance to attack Sherman's scholarship, opinions, pedagogy. She wrote a number of satires on his Analytics, especially the word-counting exercises. One unsigned verse of this sort appeared in the Hespertan in December 1893:
I am dying, Egypt, dying,
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast;
And the dark Plutonian shadows
Gather on the evening blast;
Ah I counted, Queen, and counted,
And rows of figures massed
Till e'en my days are numbered,
And I'm counted out at last.

She also crossed swords with Sherman in her book column in the Journal. When he attacked Du Maurier's Trilby as immoral in his book column in the Lincoln Evening News, she wrote a spirited defense of the novel. Sherman's pedagogical method on exams, which involved asking multiple, minute, nit-picking questions, also irritated Cather. Olivia Pound remembered that one day after an interminable number of these queries, Sherman asked, apropos of the mother of Coriolanus, "What did the noble matron Volumnia say then?" Cather's answer: "The noble matron Volumnia then said 'Bow-wow. '" Sherman apparently settled scores with her later when she applied, unsuccessfully, to fill a vacancy that occurred in the English Department the year after she graduated.

Even before Sherman had become her bĉte noire, she was attacking pedantry. In the freshman Shakespeare essay she wrote that the literary analysts never find life in what they analyze: "They never feel the hot blood riot in the pulses, nor hear the great heartbeat. That is the one great job which belongs exclusively to those of us who are unlearned, unlettered." She was disappointed not to find in Lincoln speculative, wide-ranging teachers like Will Ducker, the passionate amateur with whom she had read the classics in Red Cloud. "In the classical courses at Nebraska, as at most universities, there was altogether too much gerund-grinding . . . . The great initiation promised for the truly elect was into the mysterious classification of Sanskrit verbs."

There was one professor, however, who was different: Herbert Bates, with whom she developed a close relationship. He gave her the kind of stimulation and encouragement she needed. As a writer himself, he understood and befriended her. He sits for the portrait of Jim Burden's admired Gaston Cleric in My Ántonia: "I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds." It was his talk that she valued, as well as his knowledge. In the novel Jim recalls vivid memories of the evenings he spent with Cleric, who could recite Dante, canto after canto; and sometimes he stayed far into the night talking about Latin and English poetry and Italy.

Cather was highly selective in the friends she made in college, choosing the people she wanted and ignoring the rest, and the friendships she made were lifetime relationships. Her friends recognized her qualities and were devoted to her. In retrospect it seems that the people she chose were among the most cultivated and interesting people in Lincoln. Among them were the Westermanns, a German family that owned the Evening News; the Canfield family—James the chancellor, his wife Flavia, a painter, and Dorothy, who was in the eighth grade when Cather went to Lincoln; the Gere family—father and mother, daughters Mariel, Frances, and Ellen, Cather's fellow students; Will Owen Jones, managing editor of Charles Gere's Journal; Dr. Julius Tyndale, brother of Mrs. Westermann and fellow drama critic; and Louise Pound, the brilliant daughter of a prominent judge. All of these people are important dramatis personae in Cather's life.

The Westermanns, some of whom later moved to New York, where Cather saw them, appear briefly in One of Ours (1922) as the Erlich family. The protagonist of that novel, Claude Wheeler, visits the Erlichs during his college years in Lincoln, as Cather did the Westermanns. Julius Erlich takes Claude home to meet his mother and brothers: "Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced, terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides, above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men, seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and they were all talking at once." Five of the young men were Julius's brothers. "Claude never before had seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one another." When their mother came in, she "seemed to him very young to be the head of such a family. Her hair was still brown, and she wore it drawn over her ears and twisted in two little horns, like the ladies in old daguerreotypes." Mrs. Westermann, who in real life also had six boys, was a gracious hostess who charmed Cather, as Mrs. Erlich does Claude. The house, which formerly had been occupied by the chancellor, stood on S Street, adjacent to the campus. William Westermann remembered that Cather's "depiction of the dinners which 'Claude' attended at the Erlich house contains memories of the many meals, on Sunday particularly, which Miss Cather took at our house." The Westermann family gave her the contact with a cultivated German family that she had had in Red Cloud with the Wieners.

The Canfields, at the head of the university hierarchy, were important people in Lincoln. James, according to Alvin Johnson, was adored by the students, who "regarded him not only as a shining representative of the world of culture, but as a true democrat, who used all his influence to abate the snobbishness of the students from the families that composed the rising middle class. He was constantly urging the more prosperous fathers to hold allowances to their sons and daughters to a minimum." Mrs. Canfield was mad about art, chiefly painting, which she did herself, but also literature and music. She was an irresponsible and outspoken woman, energetically involved in women's activities, a club woman almost to the point of caricature. Cather took an ironic view of this side of her nature but was genuinely interested in her French experiences. She had taken Dorothy to France with her for a year while she studied painting. Dorothy, the member of the family that Cather was genuinely attracted to, played the violin, fenced with skill, spoke fluent French, and captivated everyone. Johnson said the students idolized Dorothy,"a little girl . . . with lustrous brown eyes and abundant brown curls and the winning ways of a little fairy out of the storybooks." She went to college at Ohio State University after her father became president there, then took a Ph.D. in French at Columbia; but she did not make a career as a teacher. She on her part idolized Cather as a sort of talented older sister, and in later years, when both became novelists, they maintained their friendship and carried on an extensive correspondence.

The earliest fruit of Cather's friendship with Dorothy Canfield was a short story, "'The Fear that Walks by Noonday,'" which Cather published in the Sombrero the year she was literary editor. Dorothy remembered: "At a football game where we happened to be on the same grandstand, I gave her the idea of a football story—of all things! A fancy that had just occurred to me. She wrote the story, and very generously, I thought, put my name with hers as if I had helped write her story although I would have been perfectly incapable of that at that age. The story got a prize, $10.00—all of that! She gave me half of it. I thought it was generosity itself and still do." The tale is noteworthy because it is the first example of the Gothicism that runs through Cather's work, becoming a major element in her final novels. The story is not very good: a very conventional ghost tale in which a football team is defeated by an invisible twelfth member of the opposing team, the ghostly extra player being the recently deceased star of the winning team. The story is full of terror and melodrama as eerie events take place on the field, but Cather had not yet learned how to introduce successfully supernatural events into the normal world. Susan Rosowski writes: "Yet because it is crude it is also clear and therefore useful in pointing to something important in Cather's writing: her acknowledgement that human experience contains dark mysteries, inexplicable by ordinary rules of logic but nonetheless there."

The Geres, Will Owen Jones, and Dr. Tyndale were friends of Cather's career in journalism. Charles Gere, editor and publisher of the Journal, was her employer during the last three years she lived in Lincoln. His daughters all were close friends, especially Mariel, with whom Cather corresponded long after she left Nebraska. On the Journal 's sixtieth anniversary Cather wrote a graceful tribute to Mr. Gere, whose patience with her early writing seemed to her monumental. "I was paid one dollar a column, which was certainly all my high-stepping rhetoric was worth. Those out-pourings were pretty dreadful, but . . . he let me step as high as I wished. It was rather hard on his readers, perhaps, but it was good for me, because it enabled me to riot in fine writing until I got to hate it, and began slowly to recover." She added that sometimes there would be a twinkle in his eye that made her distrustful of her rhetorical magnificence, but he never corrected her. Will Owen Jones, the young managing editor of the Journal, taught journalism part-time at the university. Her close relationship with him began during her junior year, when she took a course from him that led to her regular employment on the paper.

Dr. Tyndale, an uncle of the Westermann boys, had come to Lincoln in 1893 for his health and to practice medicine. He wrote drama criticism as a hobby. He had come from the East, knew a lot about the theater, and wrote cocky, humorous notices. He also was "a severe iconoclast, took especial interest in Willa Cather, and in revolutionizing some of her ideas." Before she began writing drama reviews, the Courier had complained that theater reviewing in Lincoln, except for the columns of Dr. Tyndale in the News, was "a dreary waste of undiluted mediocrity." Cather's friendship with this fifty year-old single doctor, a rather debonair character, caused a lot of talk among self-appointed guardians of the public morals. But Cather paid no attention and cultivated this important friendship. Dr. Tyndale, Lewis believes, is the one who arranged for her to spend a week in Chicago seeing opera during her senior year, and there is a bit of him in the character of Dr. Englehardt in a late story,"Double Birthday." He also had a hand in persuading Cather to dress like a young woman. On one occasion, when she went to a party in boys' clothes, he told her "that was the last straw . . . she would have to be less conspicuous." She also went to him for counsel when she felt downhearted and discouraged.

Her relationship with Louise Pound was unlike any other friendship she made in college. When Cather arrived in Lincoln as a second prep, Pound was already a junior, though only a year and a half older. As a member of one of the pioneer first families of the city, she had social standing as well as brains. Cather's masculine nonconformity contrasted sharply with Pound's demeanor. Louise was beautiful, dressed fashionably, let her hair grow, and promoted the cause of women by becoming an athlete, pianist, and campus leader. Though she played tennis, golf, won prizes as a cyclist, managed the women's basketball team, helped organize a women's military company that drilled with Springfield rifles, she was very feminine in appearance. She also was a scholar and after college took a Ph.D. at Heidelberg. The two women were thrown together in Cather's freshman year when they both were associate editors of the Lasso and later when they took part in dramatic productions.

Cather fell in love, apparently for the first time in her life. Whether this love should be considered a serious affair or a short-lived freshman's "crush" on a senior is arguable. To call this a lesbian relationship, as some critics have done, is to give it undue importance. Pound did not return the affection with anything like the fervor with which it was given. She had many admirers of both sexes, was not inclined to focus her attention on any one individual, and this relationship came to an abrupt end after about two and a half years.

There is no doubt, however, that Cather went through a tempestuous psychological experience during this period. She confessed to Dorothy Canfield Fisher years later that during her youth she was mixed up, tormented; those were years of frenzy, she said. The earliest documentation of this frenzied period comes from an indiscreet letter Cather wrote Louise from her rooming house a few blocks from the Pound home. It was mid June 1892 at the time of Louise's graduation. Willa was packing to go home to Red Cloud for the summer. She was very unhappy that she had been unable to bid Louise a proper good-bye the night before, that she had not told Louise how handsome she looked in her new Worth gown. The house had been full of people, all admirers of Louise. Cather was especially jealous of one young man in a dress coat who seemed to be enamoured of Louise. She was also unhappy that she would not see Pound for a long time, that her going away probably would not make much difference to Louise. The letter is highly charged with the emotions of unrequited love. It also states rather remorsefully Cather's view of close female relationships: it is manifestly unfair that feminine friendship should be regarded as unnatural, she told Pound. She felt much put upon by this social attitude and seemed willing to flout convention, as she had on other matters when she was in high school in Red Cloud. Pound apparently wanted only an ordinary friendship and continually held Cather at arm's length.

This infatuation continued during the following year, when Cather was a sophomore, and after she went home for the summer in 1893, she wrote Louise begging her to come to Red Cloud for a visit. She wrote that she was feeling blue and disconsolate. She was in a state of internal revolution. She implored her friend to come down and save her soul. But before she finished writing, she received a card from Pound announcing that she was not coming. Cather finished her letter reproachfully, saying that their friendship had been too one-sided, that she did not want to go on this way. Louise reconsidered and in July traveled down to Red Cloud.

Cather prepared for the visit like a general planning a campaign. Because Louise was not used to children, Willa bribed her seven-year-old brother James with two nickels and a bottle of pop to go out into the country to visit, but she forgot to tell him how long to stay away. The next day he hitchhiked home with a farmer driving into town and began lavishing his affections on the visitor. They got on much better than she expected, Cather wrote Mariel Gere, but it was a nuisance having the child underfoot all the time. For Cather the visit was all too short, just enough to make her feel the need for her friend. She drove Louise all over the country, driving with one hand, she said, and sometimes with no hands at all. She was eager to get back to Lincoln for school and to see Louise again. She was delighted to find out that one of her rivals for Pound's affections, a girl named DePue, was soon to be married. That meant victory for her. She would have won the ground from under her rival, and that marriage would be her coronation. She would be number one. Heaven help the Greek and Latin during the coming year, she wrote. She ended by urging Mariel not to let her younger sisters, Ellen and Frances, see the last page of her letter. She did not want to corrupt them with her "spooniness." Louise had broken her of writing letters like this, but every once in a while she could not help it, she added.

Eight months later Cather demolished her relationship with the entire Pound family. No one knew why she did it, and it is possible she did not even realize what she was doing. The cause of the rupture was a lampoon of Roscoe Pound that she published in the Hesperian in the form of a Theophrastean "character": the University Graduate. She had written other "characters" that were either innocuous or based on unidentifiable real people, but the piece on Louise Pound's brother was unmistakable and certainly unflattering. In it Roscoe Pound is pompous, stuffy, conceited, and impressed with his own importance. He stands "around the halls buttonholing old acquaintances and showing the University to them." He exhibits the buildings and faculty "with an air of proprietorship and pleased condescension." He belongs to the botany seminar and "calls everything by its longest and most Latin name." "In his earliest youth he was a notorious bully, and little boys of the neighborhood used to be afraid to go past his house." Now he bullies people verbally and loves to "browbeat them, argue them down, Latin them into a corner, and botany them into a shapeless mass." And he likes to hand around the university "in order that people may ask who he is and be told what fine marks he used to get in his classes."

There is no documentation other than this "character" to reconstruct the relationship between Cather and Louise's brother. There obviously was a sharp clash in personalities, and Willa and Roscoe no doubt often took adversarial positions. He was a lawyer-botanist whose scientific mind was occupied with the precise details of taxonomy. He also was the soul of propriety and convention, and Cather's aggressive nonconformity must have irritated him considerably. Her "crush" on his sister perhaps sharpened the antipathy, but it is pure speculation to suggest, as Phyllis Robinson does in her biography of Cather, that Roscoe had charged Willa with being a lesbian. There is a good bit of truth in the "character" she wrote, and she may not have given any thought to how easily identifiable her subject would be. The Pound family was furious and declared Cather persona non grata in their house, where she had been entertained many times. Louise Pound told an interviewer in 1937 that Cather had used material gained while a guest of the Pounds. "The breach of etiquette Mother Pound and Sister Oliva found unforgivable."

As the "character" of Roscoe Pound suggests, Cather was a long time learning tact and discretion. In her college years she expressed her distaste for Professor Sherman openly and made enemies among her classmates by her outspoken opinions. Just a decade later she raised a storm of protest from her family and Will Owen Jones when she put her beloved Aunt Franc into "A Wagner Matinee." She had no idea that the home folks would object to the story. About the time she published The Troll Garden she did something that greatly disturbed the Canfields. What it was can only be conjectured, but the ridiculous figure of Flavia Hamilton in the story "Flavia and Her Artists" is altogether too much like Flavia Canfield not to be noticed. In 1916 H. L. Mencken turned down her story "The Diamond Mine" for The Smart Set. He was afraid that the story, which is based on the career of Lillian Nordica, American soprano, would open him to a libel suit.

Throughout her life Cather put real people into her fiction, but in later years she was somewhat more circumspect. Though Thea Kronborg as an adult singer is based on the life of Olive Fremstad, the portrait is flattering, and Fremstad was pleased. So were Annie Pavelka and the Miner sisters when My Ántonia appeared. The character of Claude Wheeler, protagonist of One of Ours (1922), was drawn from her cousin who had been killed in World War I, but this too is a sympathetic portrayal. His widow, Enid in the novel, however, is drawn as a despicable character, and she must have been upset by the book; but there is no record of her reaction. There is a record, however, of an angry response from a minister in Lincoln who delivered a sermon defending a preacher friend named Welden against what he regarded as slander in Cather's creation of a bigoted, narrow-minded clergyman in the novel named Weldon. When Cather wrote A Lost Lady, both Garbers were dead and left no direct descendants who might object to the adultery in the plot. The unflattering portrait of Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy is based on a real person who has not yet been positively identified. Cather was much upset by the anger she caused with her "character" of Roscoe Pound and still remembered it painfully two years later when she wrote Mariel Gere from Red Cloud. Mariel had been a bracer to her, she said, ever since she was a shaved-headed prep, and she never would have got through the Pound scrape without her. Her father, mother, other friends, and the Lord deserted her, but Mariel took her up. When would she ever be done making a fool of herself, she added. The break with Louise was not irrevocable, however, though they never were close again, and three years later Cather was writing her from Pittsburgh to describe in great detail her new job on the Pittsburgh Leader.

CHAPTER 5

Turning Professional

When readers of the Nebraska State Journal opened their Sunday papers on November 5, 1893, they found a new column, "One Way of Putting It," written, though unsigned, by Willa Cather. She was then in the first semester of her junior year and still a month short of being twenty. This was the debut of her professional career in journalism, which lasted until 1912 and took her from Lincoln to Pittsburgh and finally to New York. During this time she probably turned out more copy than appears in all of her collected works of the following thirty-five years. When she died in 1947 her public was virtually unaware of this long foreground as a newspaper and magazine writer. She did not talk about it and regarded it as a closed part of her life, but it is the long apprenticeship that leads to her mature artistry. The sheer bulk of her writing in her years as a journalist is astonishing, and even after a generation of scholarly digging into the archives, all of it has not yet been identified.

During the fall and early winter of 1893 she still was managing editor of the Hesperian, and until she got out the special Charter Day issue in mid-February, she had to divide her time. Even so, she appeared in the Journal more than once a week until February and for the rest of the year doubled her contributions. She stopped writing stories for the Hesperian and began turning out sketches and vignettes of real life written in a fictional form. None of these early columns is very remarkable, but her facility with words, her ability to turn a phrase, her eye for detail are already very competent. What she remembered as her "high-stepping rhetoric" more than thirty years later is actually a felicitous prose style. She had not yet learned to distinguish sentiment from sentimentality, and her striving for effect is unsubtle, but she already was the equal of the older professionals who wrote for the Lincoln papers.

Her beginning was modest enough. As her columns were unsigned, only her friends and the newspaper staff knew who had written "One Way of Putting It." At one dollar per column she had to work like the devil to earn enough to pay her board and room. It took about one thousand words to fill a column, so that she was being paid sweatshop wages of one-tenth of a cent per word. After a few weeks, however, the paper began giving her line drawings to illustrate her columns, and then they gave her a two-column box heading. But she did not get a real by-line until the twenty-seventh of May, when she wrote a feature story on the circus. She produced about sixty-five thousand words during her first year on the Journal and earned about sixty-five dollars, enough to pay her board and room for five months.

The opening column began with the description of a church service in a fashionable church: "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." This vignette then is followed by an account of a prison chaplian preaching to three hundred convicts "in a bare, barn-like room with a low ceiling and grated windows. " He too speaks of the brotherhood of man. The third of these Sunday morning sketches takes place in a Salvation Army tent where a collection of human derelicts is singing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb." Contrasts such as these supply the method in these early columns: a poor girl at Christmastime looking wistfully through a shop window at a beautiful doll; a drunken bum reciting Shelley and Browning; an unfeeling and bored son attending his mother's funeral; a whore in a theater balcony looking down on a happily married couple and their child in a box below. One little tale is like an O. Henry story with a surprise ending: an old, partly paralyzed man in the theater gallery turns out to be the former leading man of the actress performing on stage. Every once in a while something jumps off the page to arrest one's attention, a remark that is characteristic of Cather's whole attitude toward life and art or an idea that will inform her later work. After the Salvation Army scene, she writes: "By what is man ever saved other than by enthusiasm . . . . A genius is just another way of defining a great enthusiast." In another sketch she describes a businessman with a manuscript novel in his desk, the narrative device she later used in My Ántonia.

The theater setting of some of her columns is not surprising because she was also beginning to review plays. Her first play notice, unsigned in the "Amusements" column, was a review of Walker Whiteside's Richelieu on November 22, and four days later she reviewed Clara Morris's Camille, her first major piece of theater criticism. It was a memorable night at the theater, and she was thrilled by the performance of what she later called "the one great drama of the century." "To commend, even to speak of the great work done on the Lansing stage last night," she rhapsodized, "seems almost presumption. Better work has never been done by any actress in any country. Nothing can be more natural than nature, more lifelike than life. There are heights beyond which even art cannot rise. Comments upon the wonderful power of Clara Morris's voice, upon the technical perfection of her acting are utterly unnecessary." She continued: "Camille is an awful play. Clara Morris plays only awful plays. Her realism is terrible and relentless. It is her art and mission to see all that is terrible and painful and unexplained in life. It is a dark and gloomy work." Such a powerful impression did Dumas's play make on her that she recreated this performance twenty-five years later in My Ántonia when Jim Burden takes Lena Lingard to the theater during his student days in Lincoln.

Both of these early reviews were unsigned, but by the following month Cather was beginning to initial her theater notices. The extravagant praise she heaped on Camille was not typical of her drama criticism. The first signed notice, a review of Edwin Royle's Friends, praised the actors but panned the play, a "drama on one man's loving another better than himself. It is a beautiful idea, perhaps, but it does not exist outside of girls' boarding schools." Cather did not hesitate to call a play phony when she thought it was, even though the audience loved it. She was also blunt in her criticism of bad acting; and a few days later, after watching some particularly inept performances at the Funk Theater, she suggested, apropos of the large portrait of Shakespeare painted on the drop curtain, that "someone ought to have common decency enough to paint that great face out, and profane his name no more." When she had to review Robert Downing, she concluded that his forte was his neck. "Mr. Downing is a conscientious actor and he believes in giving the public their money's worth, and as he has very little else to give them, he gives with royal bounty the beauty of his physique. No actress, however aspiring, has ever dared to be quite so liberal with her neck as Mr. Downing. He makes it the chief attraction." And she went on to note that the reason he never played anything but classic roles was obvious: they allowed a man to wear "decolleté robes."

By the second semester of her junior year, Cather had become the regular drama critic for the Journal. She very soon acquired a reputation as the liveliest and least inhibited reviewer in the Midwest. The lack of tact that often caused her trouble in her personal relationships made her reviews lively reading for the paper's subscribers. She was the chief reason the Des Moines Record noted that "the best theatrical critics of the west are said to be connected with the Lincoln, Neb., press." Gustav Frohman, who was involved in sending out road companies to all parts of the country, visited Lincoln and declared: "Lincoln newspapers are noted for their honesty . . . in dramatic matters, and it is the best advertisement of intelligence and refinement that a town can have. I have heard of it from professionals and non-professionals all along the road, and poor companies begin to tremble long before they get here. That kind of respect is worth something." He too was generalizing on the basis of Cather's reviewing. Will Owen Jones remembered: "Many an actor of national reputation wondered on coming to Lincoln what would appear next morning from the pen of that meatax young girl of whom all of them had heard. Miss Cather did not stand in awe of the greatest actors, but set each one in his place with all the authority of a veteran metropolitan critic."

Cather also was willing to take on other drama critics. When an article by a pseudonymous "Jane Archer" appeared in the Journal attacking Cather's exuberant review of Clara Morris, she defended her views with spirit: "It is a score of years too late to say that Clara Morris is not a great actress. Time and the world have decided otherwise. That she is past her prime no one denies, but she has done her work and she will go down in stage traditions as one of the greatest actors of all time . . . . Clara Morris is undoubtedly a loud actress; she uses freely both noise and intensity; but she plays only loud and stormy roles. She never has offended public taste by shouting the lines of Juliet." Then she went on to say that "the curse of every school and phase of modern art is the guild of drawing-room critics; critics who sneer at the great and powerful, and adore the clever and the dainty. They refuse to read anything more stimulating than Howells' parlor farces, and to hear any play more moving than The Rivals. This race of critics has declared Ruskin and Wagner and Turner and Modjeska blasé . . . . They take books that look well on their tables; the music that is not too loud for their parlors; the pictures that hang well on their walls."

Cather expected writers, singers, actors, to give all to their art, and she had meant it when she wrote that the god of art accepts only human sacrifices. Artists also were a law unto themselves, she believed. When "Jane Archer" extolled Julia Marlowe over Clara Morris as someone she would be delighted and honored to know, Cather replied with disgust: "This is a final test of womanhood, perhaps, but not of art. Very few of the world's great artists have been desirable acquaintances. I would ask no greater boon of heaven than to sit and watch Sarah Bernhardt night after night, but heaven preserve me from any very intimate relations with her." Cather was herself a difficult person and became increasingly prickly as she grew older, a person of strong loves and equally strong hates.

On another occasion she scoffed at the efforts of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to stop thirteen-year-old Elsie Graham from acting. "The Society claim that it is cruel for a child to be put to the strain of acting every night when she ought to be home in bed. Of course it is cruel, most art is cruel, and very few artists have time to sleep much in this world . . . . It is very kind of society to try to lighten the burden of genius, but it can't be done. Genius means relentless labor and passionate excitement from the hour one is born until the hour one dies." Later she observed that "the artist, poor fellow, has but one care, one purpose, one hope—his work. That is all God gave him; in place of love, of happiness, of popularity, only that. He is not made to live like other men; his soul is strung differently . . . . The fewer friends he has the better; every friend means one more manager." Cather too lived for her work, and the older she grew, the smaller her circle became. She clung to old friends and was reluctant to make new ones.

Cather praised and damned with great abandon during her first season as a drama critic. Julia Marlowe also was one of her favorites, and when she came to town in March, playing in Sheridan Knowles's The Love Chase, Cather wrote that "Julia Marlowe has come and gone again, leaving with us a sort of warm, rich delight that will hover about us for days." She was the "embodiment of beauty and good taste and good spirits." However, on stage she "lives too beautifully to live very hard, dies too gracefully to die very effectively. This is all very winning and beautiful, but it is not the highest kind of art." Marlowe, nevertheless, made a deep impression, and in one of Cather's last stories, "The Best Years," her character Miss Knightly is caught by a snowstorm in Lincoln because she stayed over to see Julia Marlowe in The Love Chase. When Richard Mansfield, another favorite, came to the Lansing Theater the next month, she thought his performance in Clyde Fitch's Beau Brummell "the most finished performance that Lincoln has seen for a long time . . . . Mr. Mansfield is perfectly self-contained and self-sufficient. He depends very little upon the applause or appreciation of his audience . . . . More than any other actor he acts for the play and for himself." His intelligence, his subtlety, his finesse, she found totally satisfying. When James O'Neill came to Lincoln in his famous role as the Count of Monte Cristo, however, his leading lady drew Cather's scorn. "Mademoiselle Celeste is a dream of beauty. There are few handsomer women to be found in either the higher or lower walks of the profession, but her acting is weak, insipid and pointless. She is innocent of all art or even of a clever imitation of it, and her voice was a continual and painful surprise. It rather startles one to hear the tones of a cavalry officer issue from such very bewitching lips." Lillian Lewis also was impaled on Cather's pen, and when it was announced that she was going to play Cymbeline the following season, 1894-95, Cather hoped that "they dug Shakespeare's grave very deep." The possibility that Maggie Mitchell might return to Nebraska that year brought the comment: "It has been a hard year, theatrically and otherwise, and we have had most of the seven plagues of Egypt poured on us, but we have hoped the Lord would spare us Maggie Mitchell." When Louis James and Frederick Warde, who played together, were announced, she observed that "Mr. Warde has no talent at all; Mr. James has very little" and "would that we could forget" the Othello they put on last year. Lily Langtry particularly drew her ire as an actress who could neither act nor even read her lines properly.

Cather was sensitive to the charge that she used a meat-ax in her criticism, and after she had been reviewing plays for a year began to keep a box score. In November of her senior year she reported that so far that season she had praised fourteen companies and damned fifteen. "No critic," she wrote, "enjoys perpetually 'roasting' performances. It grows desperately monotonous after a time. There is a limit to the harsh adjectives in the English language . . . . But any newspaper that bestows the same exorbitant praise upon a No. 13 Jane [a popular play] company that it humbly tenders Richard Mansfield puts itself in a very ridiculous position." The Beatrice (Nebr.) Express commented that Cather "is rather given to indiscriminate roasting, but she does it so well that everything is forgiven," and the Hesperian's rival, the Nebraskan, saluted her with:
This is for "Billy" of journalist fame,
Who writes her roasts in words of flame
And gives it to everyone just the same.
The lines were accompanied by a sketch of a smoking pen. Cather's successor on the Journal, Keene Abbott, tried to write the same kind of scathing reviews but was called into the managing editor's office and told to desist. He said his reviews were "no worse than those Willa Cather did." "Well," Will Owen Jones replied, "but that was Miss Cather!" And it was. She was sui generis.

Her reviews were not only concerned with value judgments. She was interested in the whole world of art and ranged widely in her notices. Her work showed a maturity and poise not to be expected in so young a critic, and her knowledge of drama and literature, Continental and classic as well as English, was extensive. Thus her reviews were informed and informative and demonstrated a competence that lent authority to the value judgments. She was inclined to be impressionistic and to make frequent use of biographical anecdotes; she was interested in her own responses and very confident of her ability to evaluate. Some of her notions of the reviewer's task she summarized a year after she had begun her drama criticism: "A critic's first instincts are the best because they are the truest . . . . He must take his impression as he gets it and rush it upon paper . . . . That is the great object; to have a notice alive, to have the glare of the footlights and the echo of the orchestra in it . . . . to reproduce to some extent the atmosphere of the play, to laugh if it was funny, to weep a little if it was sad, to say plainly and frankly if it was bad." The journalistic principle involved here is the exact opposite of her mature literary method, which, in brief, is emotion recollected in tranquility. She never confused her journalism with her art and always made a clear distinction between what she did to make a living and what she did for literature.

As long as she stuck to play-reviewing, she was convincing and knowledgeable, but on occasion when she strayed to other sorts of reviews, her brashness got her into trouble. During her senior year she reviewed a concert devoted to the music of Mendelssohn in which she attacked the composer: "One never realizes how tiresome Mendelssohn is until he hears him for an hour and a half together. A Mendelssohn program is always a little monotonous and disappointing, just as a Mendelssohn composition is. There is always the exaggerated elaboration of an insufficient theme, always the same promise of something really great and the same recoil from the doing of it. Either a forced excitement which results in a series of technical tricks, or a simplicity which betrays a poverty of imagination. He always substitutes excitement for fervor and nervous agitation for passion." This wrong-headed review brought a sharp response from Professor August Hagenow of the university's School of Music, who had put on the concert. He wrote the editor of the Journal to voice "the general sentiment of all intelligent musicians in denouncing the article . . . as false and misleading." Mendelssohn's reputation had been secure for half a century, he pointed out, but along comes this "upstart critic who now at this late date adventures openly to confront the whole musical world . . . armed with the asserted criterion of his own personal 'feeling' and with opposed depreciations and detractions!" Cather—who also had asserted in the same review that "perhaps there were only two masters of music who were really great, " Beethoven and Chopin—had the good sense not to attempt a rebuttal of Hagenow's letter. It did not stop her from writing music criticism, however, but as time went on, her knowledge, taste, and ability to discriminate improved measureably.

Her skill as a newspaper writer matured so rapidly that she was invited to help teach a course in journalism during the summer of 1894. For the annual Nebraska Chautauqua Assembly in July, Will Owen Jones organized a class in practical journalism with Cather as one of his two assistants. The assembly took place just west of Crete in southeastern Nebraska, where the Chautauqua grounds occupied 109 acres along the Big Blue River in a blue-green setting of woods and water. People by the thousands came by train from everywhere in the state to live for ten days in tents or cabins and attend classes, go to lectures, listen to concerts. Summer Chautauqua programs, which had begun in New York State, had spread through the country and reached Nebraska in 1882. They were an important movement in popular culture and education, and at Crete uneducated farmers from the plains mingled with people of some sophistication from Lincoln and Omaha. Cather not only taught in the journalism course, but she also was hired by Louis Westermann's paper, the Evening News, to cover the assembly.

Cather sent back to Lincoln nine well-written, informative, light-hearted reports of the annual Chautauqua. On opening day, July 3, when it rained, she described the activity of tent dwellers stretching damp canvas and cottage dwellers settling in. The next day was fair, and hammocks appeared everywhere, tennis players came out, and "sylvan wanderings" took place. Then she reported the serious business of the assembly, the lectures and concerts given by imported scholars and musicians. She was particularly impressed by the sculptor Lorado Taft, of the Chicago Art Institute, who lectured on French, Dutch, and German painting with stereopticon slides to illustrate his talks. Thirty-six years after covering his lectures she wrote him a fan letter to thank him for his fountain, which she enjoyed every time she passed through Chicago.

She also reported a lecture by Dr. Bayard Holmes, one of the promoters of Hull House and a social reformer; another by Charles Kent, professor of biblical literature from the University of Chicago. She was especially interested in Rev. Joseph Duryea, who gave a lecture course on Roman history, a subject that long had occupied her attention. Song recitals by two Chicago singers, Electa Gifford, soprano, and Katherine Fisk, contralto, drew enthusiastic comments, but she reserved her highest praise for Mrs. Will Owen Jones, whose playing of Chopin stirred the soul of an unshaven farmer sitting next to her. At the end of the Chautauqua season Cather's final report described the grounds "literally strewn with cots and camp chairs," everything "desolate and lonely," and a few lone souls wandering "about the graveyard reading epitaphs."

Another significant event that summer occurred later in July when Cather, her brother Roscoe, Mariel Gere, and another friend visited the decaying river community of Brownville on the fortieth anniversary of its founding. This visit resulted in her first long feature story, more than three thousand words, which the Journal published the next month. "It is almost unheard of to find a town in Nebraska that has a past," she began, " . . . though all of them have, or think they have, a future." The town, which had been the first settlement in the Nebraska Territory, had lost its future when the Missouri River silted up, the Union Pacific was routed through Omaha, and the founding fathers built a brand-new city at Lincoln for the state capital.

As the visitors walked through the town, they saw "handsome residences gone to [w]rack and ruin, terraces plowed up in cornfields and sloping lawns grown up in wheat and sunflowers." The main street was "lined with empty brick buildings and gaping cellar holes where the buildings have fallen down or been torn away." The white stone pavements and gutters were growing with pale, lifeless-looking grass. The rotting board sidewalks which ran over the hills clattered and creaked when one stepped on them, like rickety ladders. "Even the Lone Tree saloon [was] falling to pieces, and that, in a western town, is the sure sign that everything is gone." The article went on to recreate Brownville during its zenith before the crash, after which all the bigwigs left for Omaha. Here and there between the tumbled-down buildings were vacant lots "that fifteen or twenty years ago sold for six thousand dollars [but] would not bring six today. Lots are never sold in Brownville nowadays except cemetery lots."

The trip to Brownville made a lasting impression, and twice more she returned to the subject during her literary apprenticeship. Three years later in Pittsburgh she wrote a story, "A Resurrection," laid in Brownville and using some of the same descriptive detail. It is a sentimental tale of a widower who marries his former sweetheart years after he has been enticed into marriage by another woman. The tale is not memorable and probably was written to fill up the Home Monthly, the family magazine Cather edited after she left Lincoln; but the Brownville setting is memorable. What else was unforgettable about the town besides its decay and dilapidation was its heat. "The Hottest Day I Ever Spent" is the title of the second version of the visit, which she wrote and published in 1900. While the first account emphasized the town's fall from grandeur, the second featured the blazing inferno"when the government thermometer registered 115 degrees in the shade and 135 degrees in the sun . . . . That one day ruined the wheat and corn crops of two of the greatest agricultural states in the Union, Kansas and Nebraska." This rewriting used much of the original detail, but it added fiction to the account in the creation of Japanese and Swedish newspapermen who accompany the narrator. The Japanese, who has been to Arizona, never has seen such heat; the Swede lies "on the edge of his bed, panting like a dog," and the entire party gets sick.

Cather's last year at the university was a steady grind of newspaper work and little extracurricular activity. Carrying a full course load and reviewing theatrical events for the Journal really were two jobs. Between September and the time she graduated in June, she contributed ninety-five pieces to the paper, an average of four-plus per week. She also gave her column a new title, "As You Like It," and turned it out every week for the Sunday edition. While she spent her days going to classes, she spent her evenings at the theater. After the final curtain she had to go to the Journal office to write her review and frequently did not get home until two in the morning. When she went back to Red Cloud after graduation, she wrote Mrs. Goudy that she was dead tired, body and brain. It was one of these late nights after the theater that Stephen Crane, who was on assignment from the Bachellor Syndicate to report drought conditions in Nebraska, "was fascinated by the sight of a young girl . . . standing fast asleep. He said it was the only time he had ever seen anyone asleep on their feet like that."

This was early February 1895. The searing wind that Cather remembered in "The Hottest Day I Ever Spent" had turned Nebraska into a disaster area, and after two years of drought and crop failure, the plight of the plains states had aroused considerable interest and sympathy in the East. Crane visited Lincoln both at the beginning and the end of his two week stay in Nebraska, and Cather must have talked to him on both occasions. Cather, already interested in Crane, who was only two years older, had read The Red Badge of Courage when it was serialized in the Journal just two months earlier.

She did not write anything about this meeting at the time it took place, but she followed Crane's career, reviewed his books, and when he died wrote a piece entitled "When I Knew Stephen Crane." Writing in Pittsburgh under one of her several pseudonyms, Henry Nickelman, she created a semifictional account of this visit to Nebraska. Her male narrator is a naive college student writing for the Journal in his spare time and fresh off the range. The time is spring; the night is "oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that are the curse of the country was blowing up from Kansas." She describes Crane as thin to the point of emaciation, unshaven, slovenly dressed, and having a dark mustache and black hair. He carried with him a volume of Poe, which he was continually reading. "Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed profoundly discouraged." There was a "profound melancholy always lurking deep" in his eyes, that "seemed to be burning themselves out." He curses his trade and tells his male interviewer that he will be fortunate if he does not become a writer.

What is interesting about this account is the image it creates of Willa Cather in her senior year of college. It was Cather who was reading Poe about this time and finding him the archetypal unappreciated genius. The dark, brooding figure she draws of Crane more nearly fits the author of "The Fall of the House of Usher" than it does Stephen Crane. John Berryman says that "Crane's western journey in the first half of 1895 was the happiest time perhaps he was to know—an idyl . . . [and] his health would never be so good again." He loved the West and realized one of his desires—to be in a blizzard on the plains—an experience that resulted in one of his great stories, "The Blue Hotel." And what is more, Crane had fair hair and a light complexion. In her conclusion Cather remarks that Crane "had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth . . . . He drank life to the lees, but at the banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, somber as Poe himself."

Perhaps the most interesting detail in this sketch of Crane is even more pure Cather. She quotes him as saying that "after he got a notion for a story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal contact with it, or feel any potency to handle it. 'The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever."' This remark, she adds, "rather took a hold of me," and well it might, for it is precisely the creative process that she employed in her mature fiction. But it hardly describes the method of Crane, whose collected works fill twelve volumes and were produced between Maggie (1892) and his death at the age of twenty-nine in 1900. The interview sounds authentic, however, when Cather quotes Crane as saying that "he led a double literary life; writing in the first place, the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell." She also was grinding out newspaper copy to keep the pot boiling, but her art, unlike Crane's, was painfully slow in coming to fruition.

This problem of the double life occupied her a good deal as she approached graduation. She wanted a literary career but had to make a living. Her reading of Poe focused her attention on the dilemma, and she put her thoughts into words in an essay on Poe she wrote that spring. After summarizing Poe's great accomplishment ("Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art"), and flinging barbs at Longfellow's popularity and the littleness of Poe's New York associates like Rufus Griswold and N. P. Willis, she addressed the central issue: "I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his purpose always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was that hard labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited his imagination, that the jarring clamor about him never drowned the fine harmonies of his fancy. His discrimination remained always delicate, and from the constant strain of toil his fancy always rose strong and unfettered." This was a real question for an aspiring writer who had to hack out a living in journalism. Could one serve the gods of art and the marketplace without being corrupted? She intended to try, but she knew it would not be easy.

As she watched Crane through his brief career, she sometimes thought he had sold out. Her review of one of his poorest books, Active Service (1899), attacked the novel sharply as a work not concerned "with large, universal interests or principles, but with a yellow journalist grinding yellow copy" in a wooden fashion. "In spite of the fact that Mr. Crane has written some of the most artistic short stories in the English language, I begin to wonder whether, blinded by his youth and audacity . . . we have not taken him too seriously." But years after he died she wrote a favorable estimate of his work when she introduced Wounds in the Rain, one of the volumes of his collected works that Alfred Knopf published in 1926: "When you examine the mere writing in this unorganized material, you see at once that Crane was one of the first post-impressionists; that he began it before the French painters began it, or at least as early as the first of them. He simply knew from the beginning how to handle detail. He estimated it at its true worth—made it serve his purpose and felt no further responsibility about it. I doubt whether he ever spent a laborious half-hour in doing his duty by detail—in enumerating, like an honest, grubby auctioneer. If he saw one thing in a landscape that thrilled him, he put it on paper, but he never tried to make a faithful report of everything else within his field of vision, as if he were a conscientious salesman making out his expense account." Cather too had learned to do this. Her final view of Crane a decade later was just this: "He died young, but he had done something real. One can read him today."

Cather's meeting with Crane was not her only encounter during her college years with a figure of national visibility. William Jennings Bryan was rising to national prominence as a champion of western democracy, and Cather watched his progress with interest. The political and economic issues that produced the Populist party in the nineties interested her very little, but the personality of Bryan was fascinating. She stored her memories, and at the same time she wrote of her meeting with Crane, she turned out an essay entitled "The Personal Side of William Jennings Bryan."The occasion was Bryan's second nomination for president by the Democratic National Convention in July 1900. This account of "the great commoner" sounds much more authentic than the memory of Crane, even though it too was written under the pseudonym of Henry Nickelman.

She met Bryan on a streetcar in Lincoln when she was a "second prep." He was stumping the first congressional district in his first campaign for public office, which he won by a resounding margin. He had just made a speech and was carrying an ugly floral tribute given him by his supporters. A talkative old lady sitting near him inquired sympathetically:

"Is it for a funeral?"

Mr. Bryan looked quizzically at the flowers and replied politely:

"Well, I hope not, madam."

After this encounter Cather saw him occasionally. He lived in Lincoln and was always at home to students in his library in the evenings, and he occasionally wrote for the Hesperian when she was editor. She must have visited his library a number of times, for she describes it in detail. It fascinated her because it was so different—except for the classics—from any library she would have collected: lives of American statesmen, marked and annotated schoolboy-fashion; works on political economy, mostly by quacks; much poetry of a didactic or declamatory nature; little fiction more recent than Thackeray. "Mr. Bryan used always to be urging us to read Les Misérables if we hadn't, and to re-read it if we had. He declared that it was the greatest novel written, yet I think he had never considered its merits or demerits as a novel at all. It was Hugo's vague hyperbolic generalizations on sociological questions that he marked and quoted." That was one of Cather's favorite novels too, but for entirely different reasons.

When Bryan was in good form, Cather remembered, his conversation was "absolutely overwhelming in its richness and novelty and power, in the force and aptness of his illustrations. Yet one always felt that it was meant for the many, not the few, that it was addressed to humanity, and that there should be a stenographer present to take it down." Sometimes what he said was strikingly original; sometimes it was trite. "He chipped his eggs to the accompaniment of maxims . . . . He buttered his toast with an epigram." She also heard him speak publicly in Red Cloud at the funeral of a friend who had been a member of Congress, but she could not have heard the famous "Cross of Gold" speech that stampeded the Democratic Convention in Chicago in July 1896 and brought him his first nomination for president. Henry Nickelman says he heard it, but Willa Cather was already in Pittsburgh.

For Cather, Bryan symbolized "the entire Middle West; all its newness and vigor, its magnitude and monotony, its richness and lack of variety, its inflammability and volubility, its strength and its crudeness, its high seriousness and self-confidence, its egotism and its nobility." He never made a Democrat out of her or aroused any interest in politics, but the campaign of 1896 did give her the denouement for "Two Friends." Bryan is the only political figure she ever profiled. Like Carlyle, whom she characterized as a bad political economist, she was also inept and indifferent in the political realm. It was only the kingdom of art that she cared about.

Meeting Crane may have been stimulating, but the high spot of Cather's last semester in college was a trip to Chicago to hear grand opera. Less than a month after Crane left Lincoln, Cather and her friend Mary Jones, acting librarian of the university, boarded an eastbound Burlington train. She had not been out of Nebraska since her family migrated from Virginia. The New York Metropolitan Opera was bringing five operas to Chicago for a three-weeks' engagement. The only grand opera Cather ever had heard had been an indifferent performance of Il Trovatore by a traveling company that visited Lincoln the previous December and a concert version of Cavalleria Rusticana the year before. She had heard light opera, which she liked very much, since she was a child growing up in Red Cloud, and she had reviewed light opera for the Journal, but the real thing was still to be experienced. Her passion for opera dates from this week that she spent in Chicago hearing three Verdi operas (Falstaff, Otello, and Aida ), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, and Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.

She was carried away by Falstaff, Verdi's final masterpiece, and felt privileged to have heard only the fourth American performance of that new work. She wrote about it glowingly in the Journal after her return. The French baritone Victor Maurel, who had created the role in the French, British, and American premières, could both sing and act. His performance was not only a great operatic triumph but was also a faithful tribute to Shakespeare. In addition, she had an instinctive appreciation of the uniqueness of Verdi's final work and knew that she was hearing "an absolutely new creation." Except for one paragraph about Otello and the "fiery passion" of Francesco Tomagno in the title role, she wrote nothing more about this wonderful week, even though she also had heard Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, and Jean de Reszke; but she never forgot it. It turns up forty years later in her penultimate novel, Lucy Gayheart.

She had to pay for the trip, however, with a serious illness, the only recorded illness of her college years. Charles Cather, who was then working in Lincoln for the Security Investment Company, wrote his aunt Sidney Gore at the end of April that Willa was better but had not yet regained her strength. She had come back from Chicago sick and was in bed for a couple of weeks with what was then called typhoid-pneumonia. Her mother had come up from Red Cloud for a visit and stayed on to nurse her. She had been so exhausted from overwork that the week in Chicago was too much. She fell asleep during the final performance, Les Huguenots, but fortunately it was Meyerbeer, not Verdi, who concluded her week. She left for Chicago after writing her column for March 10 and was unable to write for the paper again until the thirty-first. But she appeared in the Journal nineteen more times before her graduation day, June 12.

The week before commencement she took part in a program held in the chapel by the three undergraduate literary societies. Cather, representing Union, read her Poe essay, while Hugh Walker, who was a Palladian, delivered an oration called "The Fate of the Greeks." The latter performance turned out to be a savage attack on the Greek-letter fraternities, rivals of the literary clubs, all of whose members were considered "barbarians" by the Greeks. Cather held no brief for the fraternities, or sororities, and never had been tempted to join one, but Walker's diatribe made her mad. She got up and tore into Walker in an extemporaneous denunciation of his immaturity and lack of humanity before turning to her own manuscript. The Journal reported laconically that she "pretty vigorously contested some of Mr. Walker's statements"; her friend Ned Abbott, who had arranged the program, reported that she "waded into Walker with an improvised roast." However, he thought the evening a glorious success, though he said the "partisans of both [Walker and Cather] lammed me for letting them be on the program."

Willa Cather, bachelor of arts, class of 1895, had her diploma but no regular job. The Journal was willing to continue paying her space-rates for her reviews and columns but did not have the wit to offer her a full-time, permanent position. She spent part of the summer in Red Cloud but continued to write regularly for the Journal. At the end of July she began a new column, "The Passing Show," which replaced "As You Like It." Then at the beginning of August the Courier, a weekly paper devoted to the arts and society and partly owned by her friend Sarah Harris, announced that "Miss Willa Cather [,] who for the past two years has been the dramatic critic and theatrical writer for the Journal, will become a member of the Courier staff. Miss Cather's reputation extends beyond Nebraska. She is thoroughly original and always entertaining." Subsequently her name began to appear on the masthead as associate editor, but it only remained there until the end of November. For two months "The Passing Show" appeared in the Courier, but she continued to review plays for the Journal. In December the Journal announced that beginning on the fifteenth, her column would again appear regularly in its Sunday issue. What was going on backstage during this period is unknown, but the Journal had her exclusive services for the balance of the year. She wrote very few pieces other than her weekly column, however.

She lived in Lincoln during the fall while she was on the Courier 's staff and at home in Red Cloud after Christmas, probably to save on board and room. She made frequent trips back to Lincoln and when she was there reviewed plays for her column. Red Cloud was less than 150 miles away, and the newspaper could get her passes on the Burlington whenever she wanted them. Her reputation continued to grow, and the Nebraska Editor described her as "a young woman with a genius for literary expression." The article went on to say that her work had made the Courier the brightest paper in Nebraska. "Her criticisms, both literary and dramatic, are clever and full of 'ginger.' . . . She keeps in touch with whatever is newest in literary work the world over, and writes her opinions freely. . . If there is a woman in Nebraska newspaper work who is destined to win a reputation for herself, that woman is Willa Cather." When the Nebraska State Press Association met in Lincoln in January, Cather was invited to speak on "how to make a newspaper interesting." She argued for personal journalism, papers that took stands on issues, papers that allowed their writers to ride their hobbies. After the meeting the Beatrice Weekly Express called her "a young woman who is rapidly achieving a western reputation, and who will soon have a national reputation." Her column seems to have been regarded as a valuable asset; her colleague on the Journal, Walt Mason, said flatly that she is "unquestionably destined to be among the foremost of American literary women." Male chauvinism in that statement: she already was better than all of the male journalists in Nebraska.

Her growing reputation, her competence, and the lack of a real job depressed her during the winter and spring in Red Cloud. When she wrote Mariel Gere on January 2, she headed her letter "Siberia." Not only was it cold, but she felt she had been banished from Lincoln. She made the best of it by taking part in local social activities and reported that she had accompanied Douglass, then sixteen, to a New Year's dance. All the elite and bon ton of Red Cloud were there, she said, but the boys were rowdy, the seats were planks laid on chairs, and the refreshments were sandwiches served from bushel baskets. Douglass was the most civilized boy in the crowd. One of the charms of the provinces, she wrote, was that one gets indifferent to everything; but she was eager to know all the news from Lincoln. On March 12 she wrote again to complain of her bitter exile and her friend's silence. She had nothing to write about, as it was then Lent, and the mad festivities of the province had ceased. She was picking up the mail, reading the papers, eating, and sleeping. Occasionally to vary the monotony she tried cooking, and when the weather permitted she rode her bicycle. The high point of February was the marriage of her cousin Retta Ayres to her neighbor Hugh Miner. She took charge of the wedding breakfast, stayed up all night arranging it, and went to the extravagance of ordering strawberries, fresh tomatoes, and watercress from Chicago. Later her parents went to Hastings, leaving her in charge of the younger children: Jim, ten; Elsie, six; and Jack, four. Jack swallowed two pennies, Jim cut his lip, and she was acting as hospital matron as well as entertainer. She was sick of Alice in Wonderland after reading it to Jim sixteen times and had switched to The Arabian Nights.

Two days after writing Mariel Gere, she wrote Mariel's father imploring his aid in helping her get a teaching position. Her friend and former teacher Herbert Bates was resigning to return east, and she desperately wanted to be his replacement. She realized her age and sex were against her, but she knew she could do it, and she was willing to work for five hundred dollars a year, which would be less than they would have to pay the man they were planning to get. Bates, she said, would recommend her to any extent. She was naive in the ways of academic appointments and politics, however, and apparently never considered the fact that she had made an enemy out of Lucius Sherman, the head of the English Department. She did not get the job and continued to languish in Red Cloud.

When she wrote Mariel again on May 2, she was both depressed and broke. She felt she could not borrow any more money from her family, and the actresses she had loaned money to in Lincoln still owed her. They can't do without their paste diamonds and champagne, she remarked ruefully. To make matters worse, she felt she was growing away from her family, their way of looking at things, and they were no longer much comfort. They expected unusual things from her, she added, and she was getting nowhere. However, she was still going to dances with Douglass, and in Blue Hill the day before she had met Fred Sund, formerly one of her editors on the Hesperian, who was now a banker. He devoted the entire evening to her, and she had danced all thirty-five dances. She also had met a Miss Gayhardt, a teacher, who spoke French and German and could talk about books and theater. She was so glad to meet someone from civilization that she stayed up most of the night talking. She remembered and used Miss Gayhardt's name in 1935 when she created the heroine of her next-to-last novel.

During this period of exile in Red Cloud she turned again to writing fiction. She told Mariel Gere that she was working on various manuscripts, but she gave no details. One manuscript probably was "A Night at Greenway Court," her tale laid in eighteenth-century Virginia, which she placed in the Nebraska Literary Magazine in June. In none of her letters of the winter or spring of 1896, however, does she mention an event that should have given her satisfaction. The January issue of the Overland Monthly had carried one of her stories, "On the Divide," and for the first time she had appeared in a magazine of national prominence. This was the magazine Bret Harte originally had edited and written for, and though it had died and been reborn to lesser glory, publication there still was an advancement for her.

"On the Divide" was her best story to date, even though she later disowned it and thought it one of the bad apples best left on the ground. It is a grim story reminiscent of those she already had published in the Hesperian. It opens: "Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw, stood Canute's shanty. North, east, south stretched the level Nebraska plain of long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind." To the west the ground was broken and rough, and there was a turbid little stream "that had scarcely ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom." The land is inhospitable: deceitfully lovely in the early summer, bitterly barren in autumn. Canute "had seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt . . . . parched by drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have left." For ten years Canute has lived alone fighting for possession of this intractable land and often contemplating suicide, but instead of killing himself, he has taken to drink to dull his senses and make life tolerable. Cather was still writing in her Hamlin Garland manner, and it would be many years before the "rust-red grass" became the "colour of wine-stains" in My Ántonia. She had not yet learned how to infuse the prairie with myth and symbol suggestive of Homer and the "wine-dark sea."

Yet there is something more in this story than the immigrant's defeat in the effort to tame the wild land. Canute, the blond Norwegian giant, has a soul, and he is not destroyed by the struggle. As the story develops, he falls in love with Lena Yensen and in the denouement carries her off bodily to his cabin, forces the preacher to marry them. Lena in the final paragraph succumbs to Canute's caveman tactics and submits happily, an ending that Jack London might well have written. This story not only reveals Cather's identification with male values, but it also shows a movement, however crude, toward the use of myth and symbol. As Canute carries off Lena, Cather writes: "So it was that Canute took her to his home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore them down to their war ships."

This story would be even more interesting as an example of Cather's effort to move towards "the immigrant's spiritual confrontation with the plains" if one could be sure that all of the ideas in it were hers. Late in her life she said she had written the story in an English course and that her professor had touched it up and sent it off to the Overland Monthly. What he added, she said, was Canute's fantastic carvings that adorned his windowsills. Crudely done, the carvings showed men plowing with little horned imps on their shoulders, men praying with a skull hanging over their heads, men fighting with serpents, and skeletons dancing together. "It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt its sting." This detail, whether or not it was Cather's invention, moves the fiction in the direction she was going: the creation of characters who have the power to make a world of their imagination.

During the year following her graduation Cather wrote a good deal about books and literature. Earlier, when she was busy reviewing plays, her columns were mostly filled with drama criticism and theatrical news. She continued to read omnivorously, and her observations in this period codify her principles and chart her future literary practice. Her love of romance; her distaste for realism; her search for artistic integrity; her devotion to style; her nostalgia, for a grander past—even at twenty-two—her passion for French literature; her distrust of women writers—all these subjects are documented in the columns she contributed to the Courier and the Journal.

When a play was made out of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, one of her favorite novels, she took the occasion to praise romance, Hope, Kipling, and above all her master Stevenson. "We are growing too analytical ourselves, and we need young men like Rudyard Kipling and Anthony Hope." They were carrying on in a small way the work of Stevenson, who had just died the previous winter. "We owe him much, that great master of pure romance . . . . Romance is the highest form of fiction, and it will never desert us." She added: "lbsens and Zolas are great, but they are temporary. Children, the sea, the sun, God himself are all romanticists. Clouds cover the sun sometimes, and there is darkness upon the face of the deep, and God hides his face from us. But they come again, and with them Romance, as fair and beautiful and still as young as when it came with the troubadours to the springlit fields outside Verona where the Dukes held their Court of Love."

She seldom had anything good to say about the work of William Dean Howells, who led the battle for realism against the romancers of the 1890s. When he published My Literary Passions in 1895, Cather thought him something of a pompous ass: "Doesn't Mr. Howells know that at one time or another everyone raves over Don Quixote, imitates Heine, worships Turgenev and calls Tolstoy a prophet? Does Mr. Howells think that no one but he ever had youth and enthusiasm and aspirations? . . . He might as well write a detailed account of how he had the measles and the whooping cough." Her disparagement of Howells was partly due to her distaste for the new Ladies' Home Journal in which his literary reminiscences appeared. He had been sandwiched between "those thrilling articles about how Henry Ward Beecher tied his necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs. Hall Caine likes."

She was quick to denounce the meretricious in art, and the appearance of a new novel by the romancer F. Marion Crawford gave her such an opportunity. She had hoped that his latest, Casa Braccio, would be one story written for his own personal pleasure, that he was rich and famous enough to do this, but it was not such a book. "I suppose the curse of having sold one's self is that one . . . can never escape from the habits of vice." What she could not forgive Crawford for was his view of the novel as a marketable commodity, his desire to please his readers at the expense of his artistic integrity. When Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for sodomy, she wrote a column attacking not his sins of the body (though she agreed that he deserved to be in prison) but his sins against literature. "To every man who has really great talent there are two ways open, the narrow one and the wide, to be great and suffer, or to be clever and comfortable." Wilde took the easy way. He lacked sincerity, reverence for his own gift, and now all one could see was "the chaos and confusion of wasted life."

The elegiac tone that permeates some of Cather's best novels is already detectable in these columns written at twenty-two. Current writers simply did not have the stature of the masters of the past. "I picked up an old American periodical last week. Among the contributors were Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and Hawthorne. Heavens, what names to stir the hearts of men!" Nowadays essays are nothing but "pleasant little chats," and there has not been a "volume of verse worth reading twice put out by a native of these states for ten years or more." "In all the literatureof the last ten years I have not found one burning conviction, one new and really confident truth wrested from the concealing elements." In one sweeping paragraph she disposed of some very good Howells, Twain, and Dickinson, not to mention the work of lesser folk like Garland, Bellamy, Bierce, Chopin, and her acquaintance Crane. She concluded these magnificent generalizations by observing: "Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English-speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James."

James always was one of her masters, but she never seems to have thought of him as a realist. Perhaps at the highest levels of art realism and romance begin to merge. Cather agreed perfectly with Hawthorne's view that a romance "sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart." James never did, whether his works were called realism or romance. She added that anyone who reads his most recent collections of stories, The Lesson of the Master and Terminations, "may find out something of what it means to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is absolutely without flaw." She was fond of quoting from James's story "The Middle Years": "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." She owed a great deal to James in some of her apprentice stories and in her first novel, and so strong was his influence that it took her a while to slip out from under his shadow.

From the time she was carrying Flaubert with her as a freshman she was a student of style. James as stylist interested her as much as James the consummate creator of character. In the same essay she declared: "One could read him forever for the beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run away with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his whole paragraph partake of the same predominating color. You are never startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never enraptured; always delighted by that masterly prose that is as correct, as classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart."

She also admired the style of Ruskin, "the greatest living master of pure English prose" and the author of "some twelve or fifteen volumes of the most perfect prose of our generation." She devoted an entire column to Ruskin, one of the last she wrote before leaving Lincoln, on hearing news (premature, as it turned out) that he was dying. Outstripping his master Carlyle, he had taken "the wild and stirring strains of the peasant philosopher and set them to delicious harmony, " and over the "rugged wisdom of the sage he has diffused the effulgent glory of a poet." She thought that his death would send people back to "the enchanted pages of The Stones of Venice " to "wonder at their melody." Ruskin had more than style for Cather; he was perhaps "the last of the great worshippers of beauty, perhaps the last man for many years to come who will ever kneel at the altar of Artemis, who will ever hear the oracle of Apollo." And, finally, he was "the last head on which the failing light of the Renaissance has lingered." His creed was, to express it roughly, that "beauty alone is truth and truth is only beauty; that art is supreme; that it is the highest, the only expression of whatever divinity there may be in man." Ruskin and Carlyle, whom she called her little tin gods, brought out her "high-stepping rhetoric."

The death of Verlaine in 1896 gave her a chance to demonstrate her devotion to French literature and defend the reputation of a favorite poet. She admitted that he was a "dirty old man," also "a profligate, a vagabond, a criminal." But he was a great poet, and that was all that mattered. She never gave a thought to a writer's morals if his work could stir her emotions. "Compared to the greatness of his work the weakness of his life is of small moment. Until we can write his verses and be respectable citizens at the same time we have small right to enter protests." These were bold words to write for the Nebraska State Journal in 1896, but she always said what she thought. "He was a practicer of every excess known to man, yet if ever inspiration and spiritual rapture came from a human pen it is in his verses on the Christ. This is all disease you say; certainly it is, but we all gather the pearls fast enough in this world and nobody troubles himself much about the disease of the oyster which produced it."

Readers of "The Passing Show" who did not know must at times have wondered if Willa Cather really were a woman. So completely had she embraced masculine values that when she wrote about women writers, she sounded like a patronizing man. One day when she saw an elevator boy reading Ouida's (Marie Louise de la Ramée's) Under Two Flags (1867), which she had read with enthusiasm as a child, she declared: "Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusted talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it." Under Two Flags contained a good plot and the rudiments of a great style, but it also contained "some of the most drivelling nonsense and mawkish sentimentality and contemptible feminine weakness to be found anywhere." "Adjectives and sentimentality ran away with her, as they do with most women's pens . . . . And the worst of it is that the woman really had great talent." In all her books there "is not one sane, normal, possible man or woman. . . . They are one rank morass of misguided genius and wasted power."

Then Cather began to generalize: "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." These were all the significant women fiction writers she could think of. She had not yet discovered Sarah Orne Jewett, who was to become her friend and mentor.

Cather also was not very charitable towards women poets. When Christina Rossetti died in 1894, she wrote an essay on three women poets: Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Sappho. Rossetti, she thought, had written one perfect poem in "The Goblin Market," but "it is a very grave question whether women have any place in poetry at all. Certainly they have only been successful in poetry of the most highly subjective nature. If a woman writes any poetry at all worth reading it must be emotional in the extreme, self-centered, self-absorbed, centrifugal." Rossetti possessed a consciousness of her limits and confined herself to the simplist lyrics. Barrett Browning before her "tried to be versatile and to go beyond the artistic limitations of her sex" but achieved merit without greatness. She wrote but one great poem, "her little volume of Sonnets from the Portuguese." Cather concluded this essay: "There is one woman poet whom all the world calls great"—Sappho. "All great poets have wondered at her verses; all inferior poets have imitated them. Twenty centuries have not cooled the passion in them." But even Sappho wrote of only one subject—love. "Save for her knowledge of human love she was unlearned, save for her perception of beauty she was blind, save for the fullness of her passions she was empty-handed."

Cather's great break came sometime late in the spring when she was offered a job on a new magazine in Pittsburgh. Axtell, Orr, and Company, publishers of the Home Monthly, needed an editor, and Cather jumped at the chance. Just how a Pittsburgh publisher happened to hire a twenty-two-year-old woman from Nebraska to edit his magazine is not known. There are a few clues, but no facts. George Gerwig, a Lincoln insurance man with an M.A. in English, had moved to Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), in 1892. He had written drama criticism for the Journal before Cather took over and was one of her early friends in Lincoln. He returned to Nebraska for a visit in March when Cather was trying unsuccessfully to get a teaching job. It is a reasonable guess to suppose that he knew of the opening and suggested her. Cather already had a reputation that extended beyond Nebraska, though perhaps not so far as Pennsylvania, and she certainly was well qualified. Further, James Axtell, one of the publishers, was a friend of Charles Gere, who certainly would have recommended his star columnist. Regardless of how she got the job, she was more than ready to leave Lincoln for a larger theater of operations. She lost no time in packing and departed for Pittsburgh in late June to begin the next phase of her career.

CHAPTER 6

Early Days in Pittsburgh

Still only twenty-two in June 1896, Cather travelled east towards Pennsylvania in a state of increasing excitement. She paused briefly in Chicago, where she took in a special exhibit of Paul Gustave Doré's paintings. There were great splurges of color, theatrical effects, enormous canvasses, but the whole show was a good bit like the billboards advertising The Last Days of Pompeii. Only one painting, The Neophyte, seemed to her real honest work; the rest either had a flat chromo look or were done by a trick. She continued on to Pittsburgh on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and as the train rolled across Ohio, her spirits soared. When she saw hills, clear streams, and trees the Lord had planted, her delight was so transparent that the conductor asked if she were getting back home. In a sense she was, for Pittsburgh was only about one hundred miles from her birthplace in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, and her great-great-grandfather, Jasper Cather, had begun his life in America in western Pennsylvania. Three months after reaching Pittsburgh she was able to take time off from her job to make a bicycle trip through the Shenandoah Valley. Among the several polarities that pulled at Cather all her life was the attraction of the eastern mountains against the tug of the prairie of her adopted state.

When the train reached Pittsburgh, Cather's new boss, James Axtell, was at the station to meet her. She first gave him a withering look when he approached her, as he didn't look like a publisher, but he was very cordial and took her home with him to East Liberty to stay until she could find a boarding house. In the Axtell establishment she found herself in the midst of rock-ribbed, conservative Presbyterian Pittsburgh. Though the house was delightful, set in a beautiful hilly residential area and surrounded by large ivy-covered homes—a sharp contrast to the flatness and newness of Nebraska—her heart sank when she entered the parlor. It was furnished with pieces covered grimly with hair cloth, over which presided one forbidding picture—a crayon portrait of grandpa, a preacher, the sternest Presbyterian of them all. She was glad he was off visiting somewhere, as she feared the arguseyed old patriarch, so accustomed to detecting the follies and foibles of this world, would penetrate her thin disguise and denounce her as the devotee of French fiction and the consort of musicians and strolling players. Further, she was put in the room of the Axtells' daughter, also off visiting, whose library consisted of six Bibles and many well-worn volumes of the trashy religious novels of E. P. Roe. She could stand the Bibles, she wrote Mariel Gere, but not E. P. Roe.

The conservative, Calvinist tone of the Pittsburghers, half of whom were Presbyterians, bothered her considerably at first. Her early letters from Pittsburgh and columns sent back to the Journal are full of impatient astonishment and irony. The Axtells were very nice to her, but their personalities were as chilly as a wine cellar, the result, she guessed, of believing in infant damnation. She wrote Ellen Gere, Mariel's younger sister, that Mr. Axtell meant to be a jolly man and really was awfully nice, but fun did not come naturally to him. The entire social life of the family centered on their church, and when they had parties, they invited their Sunday school class. To avoid getting entangled in Presbyterianism, Cather told the Axtells that her folks were Baptists. Alas, she added, the Baptist minister lived next door, and in ten minutes they had him over and upon her.

Before Cather moved into her own quarters, one of the Axtells' five thousand and seven hundred cousins, a young woman preparing to enter Vassar, came to dinner. When she talked about the courses she was going to take in the fall, Cather explained how many hours of coursework she had carried at the University of Nebraska. The girl looked up in sweet surprise and asked innocently how in the world Cather had managed to attend classes, write for the newspaper, and keep up her church work. Every girl here Cather explained, has her church work, just as other girls have fans or powder boxes. Before she could get away from the Axtells, she had to go to church with them and listen to a sermon on the text "Whosoever will, let him drink of the water of life freely." Later, in her correspondence with the Journal she reported satirically on the rumpus raised in Pittsburgh when Anna Held sang "O Won't You Come and Play with Me" at a supper party given at the Duquesne Club by Henry Clay Frick, a prominent Presbyterian; and she made merry over the efforts of the Pittsburgh clergy to suppress Frederick Archer's free Sunday organ recitals at Carnegie Hall.

Cather herself lost no time in going to one of these concerts. She loved music and was much impressed by the grandeur of the auditorium. Carnegie Hall had just been completed the year before and was housed in a huge building containing also the Carnegie Library and Art Gallery. The library in particular impressed her—marble from end to end—and the colors and frescoes were just one artistic harmony. She had thought the new University of Nebraska Library was nice, but this greatly surpassed it. What was even better, the library was close to her office, and it had, she thought, all the books in the world. She planned to spend a lot of time there. She also had discovered right away that the Carnegie Theater was very close and that her old friend Patiline Hall would be playing there all the next week. While the Presbyterians were doing their church work, she was going to slip across to the theater to look on Pauline's glorious anatomy once again.

These satiric reports of her first impressions of Pittsburgh and her plans to haunt the library and theater make Cather sound like a bohemian intent on hedonism. When Mariel Gere accused her of this, she replied that she had taken the veil and retired to convent life. By this she meant that she was hard at work putting out the magazine. By the middle of July she was living in a boarding house in the east end of the city, six blocks from her office. The Axtells had gone west on a trip, leaving her in sole charge of the magazine, though she only had been hired to be assistant editor. She wrote Mrs. Gere that she saw no one except the old maid who ran her boarding house and her stenographer. She was proud of having her own stenographer—especially one who could spell—but she was so busy her only excitement was in racing the electric cars on her bicycle. She had had to write half of the first issue of the magazine herself. Because her printer was inexperienced in layout, she had been down in the composing room the night before until one o'clock sweating over the forms and making up the pages. She kept her irony and satire for her friends back home; and when three Misses Rush called on her—three tall, plain, stiff, prim Presbyterians—Cather was very demure, she told Mrs. Gere, and discussed flower gardening and church music.

The Home Monthly was not much of a magazine. It had been started two years before as the Ladies' Journal, an obvious effort to capitalize on the spectacular success of the Ladies' Home Journal. Cather was hired when Axtell, Orr, and Company bought the magazine and changed the name. It was aimed at half a million firesides within one hundred miles of Pittsburgh, and an editorial in the August issue, Cather's first, stated what she called its namby-pamby policies: "These pages will be kept clean and pure in tone, and . . . all plans for the Home Monthly center in the aim to entertain, to educate, to elevate." And the contents, she thought, were great rot—home and fireside stuff, all about babies and mince pies.

The opening editorial also declared that "every phase of home needs will receive attention" and that the best story writers of the country would "furnish entertainment for the idle hour." The former goal was easy enough to achieve, though Cather said she found it hard to turn out copy about raising children and keeping house; but the latter aim never was realized. She found that she had to write a good bit of the fiction herself, and though she sometimes solicited contributions from her friends, she had no budget to buy stories from writers of national visibility. After she had edited the magazine for nine months, she concluded that it was the worst trash in the world, but it was trash her employers wanted, trash they paid for, and trash they would get.

Even from the beginning she did not plan to stay with the enterprise very long. She wrote Mrs. Gere, however, that she was determined to show everyone that she could take up a thing and stick to it, even if it did not suit her. She was working very hard and liking the challenge of the job, grind though it was. Despite the depressing nature of the publication, the financial outlook was good. She was glad to have a steady income and a full-time job. Though her salary was perhaps only one hundred dollars a month, it seemed a princely figure to someone who previously had worked for a dollar a column on the Nebraska State Journal.

There were other compensations too. The city and the rivers, she said, would make up for almost anything, and she was meeting many different kinds of people. She had met a number of New York drama critics and recently had held a forty-six-minute talk with one of her favorites, Rudyard Kipling, when he passed through Pittsburgh. She also saw the city as a more promising place than Nebraska for the promotion of her own literary fortunes. She had met a travelling editor of Cosmopolitan, to whom she had shown her story "The Count of Crow's Nest," and he had offered her one hundred dollars for it. She turned down the proposal reluctantly because she needed the story to fill up the Home Monthly, but the fact that she could publish in an important national magazine excited her. She felt that her own work was improving, that she was not wasting her time. After a month on the job her employers were willing to give her a day off whenever she felt the urge to write.

From the start Cather loved Pittsburgh, though she did not hesitate to criticize it. She saved her strictures, however, for letters home and the columns she sent back to the Journal. She called Pittsburgh the "city of dreadful dirt" in her first letter and later referred to it as "dirty, prosaic Pittsburgh that doesn't care for anything but coal and iron mills and big houses on Fifth Avenue and Holy St. Andrew Carnegie." On the occasion of a trip to Homestead, where Carnegie's mills were located, she was appalled by the sight. It's like Hades when you get there, she said—all smoke and flames. She also commented on the dampness of the climate, which contrasted sharply with the bracing air of Nebraska.

The Pittsburgh that Cather saw in 1896 seemed a real metropolis, a city of over 400,000, including neighboring Allegheny, some twelve times the size of Lincoln. Built where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio, the city always had occupied a strategic position, from colonial times when the French built Fort Duquesne there to the era of rapid industrial growth after the Civil War. Scenically the heart of the city, the "Golden Triangle," where the two rivers came together, was a spectacular location, and the surrounding hills were green and wooded. Because it was close to sources of coal and possessed excellent water and rail communications, it became a major manufacturing city by the end of the century. When Cather arrived, it already was a great steel-producing center, and it was becoming a city of great wealth. The business of Pittsburgh was business, dominated by men like Frick, Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and George Westinghouse.

Representative of the Pittsburgh business community is Cather's character Marshall McKann in "A Gold Slipper." "He was born a Presbyterian, just as he was born a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and he never missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion was not very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, made up of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do with citizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business (in which his own name was powerful), with the Republican party, and with all majorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, enthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machinery and in methods of transportation." His wife drags him to a concert, but he has no interest in or knowledge of music and regards artists as "fluffy-ruffles people."

Yet the wealth amassed in Pittsburgh by the nineteenth-century robber barons was already being recycled to make the city a cultural center. Carnegie, after applying Darwin's views on natural selection and the survival of the fittest to the ruthless creation of an industrial empire and smashing the union in the bloody Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, had turned to good works in funding libraries and concert halls. Pittsburgh profited handsomely by his notion, expressed in his essay "The Gospel of Wealth," that it was a disgrace for a man to die rich. Besides the Carnegie Library and Music Hall, Pittsburgh also had just acquired a symphony orchestra. All these cultural resources were much vaster than those of Lincoln, and Cather took advantage of them. She put a little of herself into the title character in "Paul's Case," whose spirits were released by the first strains of the symphony orchestra when he ushered at Carnegie Hall: "He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour." Pittsburgh also had more theaters and plays than Lincoln; it was a first-run city, whereas Lincoln had been second-run. She did not wait long after beginning her job on the Home Monthly to get a part-time position as drama and music critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and to involve herself in the artistic life of the city.

Her involvement in the social life of Pittsburgh also began as soon as she finished putting out the August issue of the magazine. It was a remarkable change from her life the previous year, when she was moping in Red Cloud, like Hawthorne brooding in Salem or Leopardi pining away in Recanati. Five weeks after she got off the Baltimore and Ohio to begin her new life, she needed eight large sheets of paper to tell Mariel Gere what she had been doing. The week before she had gone on a picnic with the Press Club to Erie. The previous Sunday she went on an excursion to Rock Point, up in the mountains. The best outing of all had been a steam launch party of twenty that went thirty miles up the river. They had a catered dinner on board and two blacks who played the banjo and sang in the moonlight all the way back. The launch passed big green hills rising three hundred feet from the river and fleeced here and there with big patches of white river mist. All along the shore the iron furnaces glowed like calcium lights, and gas wells shot out long plumes of flame. Then the hills of the city loomed up with a thousand lights of a thousand colors. Her escort on this excursion was George Gerwig, her old friend from Lincoln, who was, she wrote Mariel Gere, her devoted slave. He and his wife both took the trouble to see that she got acquainted.

Her most astonishing experience occurred at a tea given for the federated women's clubs by the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Mrs. Gerwig took her to this function. The city was run by women's clubs, Cather explained, and all the women in the social register were club women. Their program that day was on Carlyle, and the chairwoman politely invited Cather to say something about Carlyle, if she wanted to. She told Mariel Gere that she had the nerve to get up and spiel off her old "second prep" essay that she had written for Professor Hunt. She delivered the piece, she said, with all the fire and fervor of the tragic muse. It all came back to her, and she just soared. The club women fell all over themselves to shake her hand afterwards. They thought it was impromptu. Cather did not think much of their brains, especially their liking that sophomoric performance.

The result of her oratorical flight was a procession of women calling on her until she was almost distracted. She had fifteen calls to return, she wrote, and did not know how she was going to get her work done. She guessed she would just have to shut it off, this social life, and apparently that is what she did. The Axtells were miffed by Cather's sudden popularity, as they were not in society at all, never saw anyone but relatives, and did not much like Cather's gadding about. The novelty of this social activity, however, which was totally uncharacteristic, soon wore off, but Cather made a good many friends in her first year in Pittsburgh, many of whom remained friends for life. She continued to write satirically of women's clubs and of the feminine pursuit of culture in weekly packaged doses. When Mrs. Canfield visited Pittsburgh later and asked to be introduced to some club women, Cather could hardly get over the reversal of roles that made her the club woman and Flavia Canfield the supplicant. She said it did her wicked, un-Christian heart good to get even, to pay off the old scores and make people take back the bitter things they once had said. She was remembering that Mrs. Canfield had disapproved of her life-style when she was an undergraduate in Lincoln and had written a sharp reply to an attack she had made on women's clubs in the Journal. She was now, she reported to Mariel Gere, a member of the "swell" woman's club of the town.

Except for George Gerwig, the only friend of her Pittsburgh years who carried over from Nebraska was Dorothy Canfield. Dorothy was a sophomore at Ohio State University, where her father was president. She visited Pittsburgh on occasion, and Cather sometimes went to Columbus. After Dorothy spent her spring vacation in Pittsburgh in 1897, Cather wrote Mariel Gere to tell her what a charming girl Dorothy was growing to be. Her visit had been a joy and comfort; Cather's friends had risen nobly to the occasion; they had had a downright jolly time. There were theater parties, excursions, drives in the park, until they were exhausted. Dorothy said it was the first time she had ever been treated like a young lady. It was lonesome for Cather to return from the office now and not find her cuddled up on the divan. In 1907 Dorothy married, settled in Vermont, and the two friends drifted apart, but after they resumed their friendship by correspondence in 1913, Cather wrote that there were long years when she loved her very, very dearly. Canfield wrote in 1947: "My occasional brief stopovers in Pittsburgh were golden days for me. When people talk about Pittsburgh as a dirty, dark, noisy, grimy city, I can't imagine what they are talking about. Over it hangs, for me, a shining cloud of young memories."

The Carnegie Library, which was a magnet from the first, also produced lasting friendships. The director, Edwin Anderson, and his wife, Frances, became friends and often invited Cather to dinner, and later when Anderson became head of the New York Public Library, she kept up the relationship. May Willard, who directed the reference department, became Cather's earliest Pittsburgh friend. She always saw May when she went back to the city in later years and in 1915, with May and others, joined a folk-dancing group taught by a visiting Englishman, Cecil Sharp. Another close friend was Ethel Litchfield, who was a fine pianist. She had studied in Vienna to become a concert artist but had given up her career to marry a Pittsburgh doctor. She kept up her music, often played in Pittsburgh concerts, and her home was a stopping place for visiting musicians. Cather used to pause by her house on her way home from work before they knew each other and "stand listening to the music that streamed from it at all hours of the day and night." After Dr. Litchfield's death Ethel moved to New York, where Cather saw her often.

Early in her editorial tenure at the Home Monthly a young journalist named George Seibel offered to write an article on Richard Wagner's wild pranks. She invited him to visit the office, accepted his proposal, and asked him for more contributions. This meeting led to a warm relationship between Cather and both George and Helen Seibel, who were recently married and only a little older. Cather visited their second-floor apartment on Seventeenth Street once or twice a week during her first years in Pittsburgh and usually stayed for supper. Although George was part of the German-American community, he and Cather shared a passion for French literature. She went there to read French with him, and during her visits she and Helen would follow a text while George translated. If either woman disagreed with his reading, they would stop and discuss the translation. In this manner they went through Daudet's Les Femmes d'artistes, de Musset's Poésies nouvelles, novels by Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, and Georges Huysmans. They also read Victor Hugo's drama Hernani and poems by Théophile Gautier, Verlaine, and Baudelaire. Their taste was for the Romantics, and though they read the realistic Madame Bovary, which Cather had loved in college, her taste at this time was more for Flaubert's romantic Salammbô.

After the readings there would be a German supper: noodle soup, potato salad, cucumbers, and cookies. On Christmas Eves Cather usually helped trim the tree, and on one occasion she took Dorothy Canfield with her. Dorothy remembered clearly half a century later the cosmopolitan atmosphere, stimulating talk, and George standing against a background of Christmas greens reciting a Christmas poem by Heine:
Der Stern blieb stehn über Josephs Haus.
Da sind sie hineingegangen;
Das Oechslein brullte, das Kindlein schrie,
Die heil'gen drei Koenige sangen.
"It sounded wonderfully fine as he rolled it out in his rich German. Willa was enchanted by it, got the book out from the shelves back of us, copied off the poem, and before I had gone on from Pittsburgh to Vermont, had made an admirable rhymed translation."
The star now stops above Joseph's roof,
     And they enter the cottage lowly;
The oxen bellowed, the infant cried,
     While sang the three kings holy.
Many years later Canfield wrote Cather asking her if she remembered translating that poem. She replied that she did not, but it was just like her, she thought, to be translating from a language in which she could not have conjugated a single verb.

Seibel recalled Cather at this period as looking about eighteen: "She was plump and dimpled, with dreamy eyes and an eager mind." "More than books, Willa was interested in the study of human nature. She was avid of the world, always wondering, always questing, always digging." She and Seibel got on very well except when they disagreed over Henry James's novels, but they both admired his critical essays on French writers. It was also at this period that Cather discovered Sarah Orne Jewett and gave Seibel as a Christmas gift one year The Country of the Pointed Firs, then a new book. After Cather left Pittsburgh for New York, she corresponded with the Seibels and occasionally saw them on return visits to Pennsylvania or when they visited New York.

Subscribers to the Home Monthly were treated to a large dose of Cather's apprentice fiction during her editorship. In the thirteen months following her appointment she used eight of her own stories, one a two-part serial, two signed with pseudonyms. In addition, she let the magazine have another tale that appeared the year after she resigned her position. Most of these stories are unremarkable and would not detain anyone if they had not been written by young Willa Cather. The first to appear was "Tommy, the Unsentimental," her tomboy story, which is one of the more significant of her early fictions. It illustrates the ambivalence she always felt towards the East and the West, and curiously enough, this first published fiction in Pittsburgh contains praise for the flatlands of Nebraska. Tommy goes off to school in the East, but she can't wait to get back to her hometown on the prairie. When she returns she says: "It's all very fine down East there, and the hills are great, but one gets mighty homesick for this sky . . . . Down there the skies are all pale and smoky . . . . And this wind . . . I used to get hungry for this wind! I couldn't sleep in that lifeless stillness down there."

The two-part serial was "The Count of Crow's Nest, " the story she could have sold to Cosmopolitan. It was the longest piece of fiction she yet had written and shows developing skill in narrative technique. Her passion for Henry James perhaps is shown in a plot that makes one think of "The Aspern Papers." Her setting, however, is a boarding house in Chicago rather than the exotic canals and palazzi of Venice, but the effort to obtain a bundle of letters is common to both stories. Cather, however, departs from the Jamesian model by making the unscrupulous letter-seeker a woman. The tale makes rudimentary use of a minor-character consciousness as it recounts the experiences of a young male college graduate who lives temporarily in a boarding house of failed people while he tries to decide on a career. One of the inmates, the main character, is an elderly count, Paul de Koch, born in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg but now impoverished, the last of his line, exiled to darkest Chicago.

Young Harold Buchanan and the count are drawn together through a mutual interest in French literature, and as the plot unfolds Harold meets the count's no-good daughter, a third-rate singer who is venal, grasping, and dishonorable. The count has in his possession letters which if published would blast the reputations of unspecified titled Europeans. The daughter thinks there would be a fortune in publishing them. The father stoutly refuses. The daughter steals the letters, and in the denouement Harold accompanies the old man to his daughter's lodging in the middle of the night, and they force the daughter to give up the papers. The story is entertaining, a good yarn, and doubtless as good as much of the fiction the Cosmopolitan was publishing.

Two of the nine stories Cather published in the Home Monthly are fairy tales for children, the sort of tale she used to make up in Red Cloud to tell her younger brothers and sister. "The Princess Baladina—Her Adventure" is not much of a yarn and Cather signed it "Charles Douglass." "The Strategy of the Were-Wolf Dog" is a Santa Claus Christmas story something on the order of "Rudolph, the Red-Nose Reindeer." Appearing in the December 1896 issue of the magazine, it was well enough done that the author signed her own name. A third story of this period, "A Resurrection," is the Brownville tale; and the one that appeared after she left the magazine was "The Way of the World," the story of the play town "Sandy Point."

A second story that appeared in the Christmas issue of the Home Monthly, also published pseudonymously, is "The Burglar's Christmas," a very amateurish and sentimental reworking of the prodigal son theme. But this tale, in the view of Sharon O'Brien, "is a crucial story in the Cather canon because its psychological themes connect both to her life and to her later fiction." A destitute and derelict young man named William breaks into a Chicago mansion on Christmas Eve and while robbing the boudoir of the owner finds the silver drinking cup he used as a child. He is robbing the home of his own parents. At that moment his mother comes into the room, recognizes him, and cries out: "Willie, Willie! Is it you?" In the recognition scene that follows the mother forgives her contrite son, and the tale ends with the young man sitting passively by the fire happily stuffed with a good dinner. O'Brien says, "He has returned to the oral stage, the period in human development symbolized by the baby's silver drinking mug." This critic sees the story as reflecting Cather's sexual identity problem, her "unconscious desires and fears," William as a mask for Willa, and the "young author unaware of what she is concealing or revealing." This psychoanalysis of Cather on the basis of a very minor and amateurish story may seem reductive, but there is no doubt that Cather's relationship with her mother was unsatisfactory in some respects and caused tensions and anxieties. She comments on occasion that her younger sister Jessica, who dressed and acted like a lady, was more her mother's idea of a proper daughter than she was. Fortunately the psychic problem, such as it was, had no crippling effect on her adult artistic career.

Two other Home Monthly stories are only worth brief comment. "The Prodigies" is her first story laid presumably in Pittsburgh and the first making the performing arts her subject. The story, which concerns the exploitation of two gifted child musicians by their ambitious mother, foreshadows the intense interest Cather took many years later in the Menuhin children. The tale is viewed from the point of view of a pianist like Cather's friend Ethel Litchfield, who gave up a career to marry a physician. Also, in the relationship between the ambitious mother and her husband Cather depicts the first of many unhappy marriages in her fiction. "Nanette: An Aside," Cather's first fictional creation of an opera singer, is a slight tale, mostly a dialogue between the singer and her maid, who has fallen in love with a headwaiter. The singer is a battle-scarred veteran, unhappily married, and the maid Nanette is full of romantic yearnings.

During her first year in Pittsburgh Cather was a bundle of energy. Not only did she edit the magazine almost single-handedly, write stories and nonfiction articles for it, carry on an active social life, but she also wrote and edited a page called "Our Young Folks" in the National Stockman and Farmer, another publication owned by Axtell, Orr, and Company. As if this were not enough, she began writing music and drama criticism for the Pittsburgh Leader, and before she went home for the summer had published twenty-six reviews. She also resumed writing "The Passing Show" for the Nebraska State Journal, producing seventeen columns between December and May. There was, of course, some overlap in what she published in both Lincoln and Pittsburgh.

A glance at the contents of the Home Monthly reveals Cather's industry, versatility, ingenuity, and literary enthusiasms at that period. She barely had arrived in Pittsburgh before she was writing Mrs. Gere for information about Mrs. William Jennings Bryan. Her Pittsburgh landlady was going to supply her with information on Mrs. William McKinley, whom she had known in her youth, and she was going to write an article on the wives of the two presidential candidates. After she finished that one, she wrote others on the Burns centenary, singers' salaries, the death of George Du Maurier, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and nursing as a profession for women. She also turned out editorials and wrote a monthly book column that continued even after she resigned from the magazine.

Entitled "Old Books and New," the book column ranged widely over old favorites and new discoveries. She enthusiastically endorsed historical romance, recommending the novels of Stanley Weyman and Alexandre Dumas; The Prisoner of Zenda, which she never tired of; S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynn ; and the "greatest of all English novels," Henry Esmond. She thought that Thackeray and Shakespeare were "the two imperial Williams, joint kings of English letters." She also praised David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities (of all of Dickens's great characters she liked Sidney Carton best); she predicted that Treasure Island "was one of the boys' books destined to immortality," and she raved about William Allen White's Boyville stories when they came out. They were worthy successors to Tom Sawyer, for "I know of no one who writes of a boy's heart as understandingly." He seemed "not to have forgotten how it feels to be a boy." She added: "I read the 'Martyrdom of "Mealy" Jones' aloud to a western boy and a boy from New Hampshire and the effect was the same."

Another new book that enchanted her was A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, and her reprinting of one of the poems was Housman's first appearance in an American magazine. "Who Mr. Housman may be I know not," she wrote, "save that he is an Englishman and that he has written some of the most musical lyrics that have been done in England for many a long day." How she found out who Housman was is a story to be told in due course. Finally, no book column Cather was likely to write ever would be silent for long on French literature, and she needed no topical event to trigger a discussion of Hugo's Les Miserables. She opened one column simply by saying: "I never feel the spring come back . . . that I don't go back and read Les Misérables over again. It's a perennial passion with me, and comes every spring in violet time." On another occasion she urged her readers to try Daudet's Kings in Exile and Anatole France's The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard.

After ten months in Pittsburgh Cather's social life had become more pleasant than it ever had been or than she ever thought it could be. Her letter to Mariel Gere just after Dorothy Canfield's visit exudes euphoria. She was living a conventional life and enjoying it. No longer was she flouting social norms by wearing her hair short, going about with her middle-aged bachelor friend Dr. Tyndale, consorting with theater people, and getting criticized. Now there was nothing to "queer" her, she wrote. It was like the beginning of a new life in broad daylight away from the old mistakes. It was a rather novel experience for her, and it had quite gone to her head.

Her social life in Pittsburgh involved friends of both sexes. Since there were few women journalists, she worked mostly with men, and she inevitably saw a good bit of her co-workers after hours. Her editorship of the magazine and her reviewing for the Leader also brought her into contact with a large number of people, some of them eligible males her own age who found her both interesting and desirable. Similar friendships seem not to have developed in Lincoln in the two years after Cather's breakup with Louise Pound. There is scant evidence that she had any romantic male friendships before she went to Pittsburgh, though there was a relationship with one young man in Lincoln. He was Charles Moore, the nephew of the man who headed the company that employed Charles Cather. Young Moore gave Cather a gold snake ring that she wore all her life. They apparently carried on an extensive correspondence, but no letters have survived.

Some of the euphoria evident in Cather's letter to Mariel Gere resulted from a proposal of marriage she had just received from a young doctor. She had not yet decided if she would accept him. She thought it would be a very good match in every way, but she was not in love. She supposed, however, that one did not have to be in love to get married. She had introduced Dorothy Canfield to the young man, and Dorothy had approved of him. She was especially pleased with the way her suitor had treated the younger girl. But in the end Cather turned down the proposal and continued her unencumbered life.

Eight months later there was another applicant for matrimony: Preston Farrar, who taught English at Allegheny High School. She dated him in the fall, and by January the affair had gotten serious. She wrote Mariel Gere that she was seeing him only in plaster these days because he had broken his leg playing football several months before. It was rather fun visiting him in his cast now that he wasn't suffering any more. Unfortunately, she added, she did not seem able to feel very deeply about him. His friendship was so warm and comfortable that she did not want to change it for the other article in which the personal equation would be sure to make trouble. She avoided matrimony again but was able to remain friends with Farrar, and in 1903 after he resigned his teaching position, she succeeded him. He later married, and Cather visited him and his wife in New York.

Cather at this time apparently came to a clear decision to remain single. She explained to Mariel Gere that she had grown fond of liberty. To be wholly free, to really be of some use somewhere, to do with her money what she wanted, to help those who had helped her, to pay the debts of her loves and her hates—those were the things she wanted to do with her life. She was at that moment sending money home to her brother Roscoe, who had been seriously ill and whom she loved more than any other man except her father. She had no need to get married for companionship, for she already had a large circle of friends and was kept very busy with her work and her social life. In the same letter she described her activities of recent days: first she had heard Melba at the opera; the next night there was a supper party given by her actress friend Lizzie Collier; the following day she had attended a dinner for Ethelbert Nevin, the composer; and a few hours before beginning her letter she had been out to dinner with a crowd at the Bishops'. She recently had got to know Anthony Hope Hawkins, who had lectured and spent several days in Pittsburgh, and had met F. Marion Crawford, who was a detestable snob. Her days and nights were more than full, and she was suffering from a lack of sleep.

To state the matter simply, Cather was married to her art and sublimated her sexual impulses in her work. Throughout her life she gave art her highest priority, preferring her work to society, to family, to friends. Few people, of course, could follow such a program rigorously, and Cather recognized her obligations to others. Nevertheless, her statements on this subject are unequivocal. On many occasions, beginning with her "second prep" essay on Carlyle, she declared that art was a merciless taskmaster, that an artist could not be successful without pouring all his energy and emotion into his art. In her Hamlet essay she had said: "If an artist does any good work he must do it alone. No number of encouraging or admiring friends can assist him . . . . He must go off alone with his own soul and they too must labor and suffer together." Twenty-four years later she had her Wagnerian soprano Thea Kronborg explain her work was her personal life; there was no way to separate her private self from her public self. The two were fused into one seamless whole. The heroine of Lucy Gayheart (1935) comes to a tragic end because she does not have this "art necessity."

Cather was convinced that marriage and art did not mix. Although she loved children and lavished her affections on her younger brothers and sister and later on her nephews and nieces, she had no desire to have children of her own. When actress Mary Anderson retired from the stage to get married, Cather reflected on the demands of career and matrimony. Mary Anderson was not a great artist, and for her perhaps the happiness of married life was the better choice. On another occasion, when Helena von Doenhoff retired from the operatic state to get married, Cather wrote a sort of obituary. The artist, she declared, must love his art above all things and must say to it, as Ruth said amidst the alien corn: "Where thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge . . . thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God." To this she added, "Married nightingales seldom sing." When actress Marie Burroughs's divorce was announced in the papers, Cather wrote in her column that Marie wanted to be free for her work and free from the obligation of matrimony. The fact that her husband had been her teacher and coach made her ungrateful, but then all actresses are ungrateful. "If they are actresses worthy of the name, they always have a premier amour to whom they return, their work." Another sentence she was fond of quoting: "He travels the swiftest who rides alone."

Cather knew, of course, that some artists combined marriage and careers successfully, and occasionally she admitted it. When she wrote a profile of Louise Homer, the Pittsburgh-born contralto, she reported that Homer was a good mother who managed "her own house, her own nursery, and her five children." She certainly knew that two of the women writers she most honored, George Eliot and George Sand, combined careers with heterosexual relationships, but they, along with Sappho, were women who had the "art instinct, the art necessity." "They had it genuinely; they tried other things and none could satisfy them." Few women, she thought, were able to commit themselves wholly to art, especially women writers. For that reason she wrote: "I have not a great deal of faith in women in literature . . . . the great masters of letters are men, and I prefer to take no chances when I read."

Cather generalized her views on matrimony to embrace marital relations between people of all types, not just artists. Late in her life when the husband of her old Red Cloud friend Mary Miner Creighton died, she wrote a letter of condolence, saying that she had known very few marriages as happy as Mary's. Happy marriages in her fiction are rare. Her artist characters sometimes avoid marriage, as does the singer Kitty Ayrshire in "A Gold Slipper," or suffer from bad marriages like Cressida Garnet, the protagonist of "The Diamond Mine." Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy marries for love and lives to regret it. Marian Forrester in A Lost Lady satisfies her passion in extramarital relations. Sometimes Cather's characters, like Thea Kronborg and Alexandra Bergson, are allowed to marry late in their lives after the passions of youth are spent. On one occasion, in the story "Uncle Valentine," she turns a happy artistic marriage in real life into a disastrous one. Her conviction that artists ran inordinate risks in getting married was reinforced for her by one of her favorite authors, Alphonse Daudet, who argues the point in Les Femmes d'artistes.

Cather's views on marriage had their source in her own physiological and psychological makeup. They were motivated by her strongest impulse—the desire to preserve the inviolability of the self. Throughout her work there is a fear of sex, as character after character is destroyed by it or survives by escaping it. All the evidence suggests that Cather too avoided sex in her private life. As an adult she clung to the image of childhood as the autonomous, sexless, happy period in life and tried to hang on to her own childhood through dress and memory. In all probability she lived the life of a celibate artist, for that life was the only one she could follow to achieve her artistic goals.

When Cather reported on her life in Pittsburgh, she said that the only activity she had in common with her years in Lincoln was theater-going. It was her passion for the stage no doubt that sent her to the Leader in search of a part-time job as music and drama critic. Pittsburgh had seven theaters and was often the first stop when New York companies took to the road. She began her reviewing in September 1896 with an unsigned notice of Roland Reed in The Wrong Mr. Wright, reviewed again in October, and covered Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle in November. By December she was writing for the Leader every week and signing her columns "Sibert," the middle name she was about to adopt permanently. During this first theatrical season in Pittsburgh she saw many of the great stars of the day: James Herne in his own play Shore Acres, Otis Skinner in A Soldier of Fortune, Fanny Davenport in Sardou's Gismonda, Olga Nethersole in Carmen, Julia Marlowe in Romeo and Juliet, Margaret Mather in Cymbeline, Nat Goodwin in An American Citizen, Maude Adams and John Drew in Rosemary, and Richard Mansfield in The Merchant of Venice.

Cather had matured as a reviewer by this time and no longer was she the "meat-ax girl" who had written for the Journal. This is not to say that she was no longer critical, but her judgments were more balanced and the tone pitched lower. "Rip Van Winkle," she wrote, "has beenbefore the public now for five-and-thirty years; yet it has lost none of its matchless charm." And about Joseph Jefferson, she added, "one of the wonderful things . . . is that he never loses his freshness of touch." Concerning Sardou, she said: "The matronly Fanny Davenport has been giving him to us all week and he is just as great as ever—in spite of Fanny." However, she gave Fanny credit for some memorable scenes, though "it takes a great deal of steam to work Miss Davenport up to any intensity at all." About the "beauteous Julia Marlow" she wrote: "Her Juliet is beautiful, graceful, winsome; it is so surprisingly good that you can not understand why it is not better . . . . She invests the part with rare poetic charm, but of that warmer, tenser element which is peculiar to Juliet and to Italy there is never a trace." Margaret Mather's $40,000 production of Cymbeline was a marvel as a production but a disappointment as art. The problem, she thought, was partly Shakespeare's for "such a rambling, stringing together of impossible incidents," but Mather had "simply no intellectual conception at all of her part." Cather noted, however, that Mather had the grippe that night and her voice, "once her chiefest charm" was gone. When John Drew and Maude Adams came to town in Rosemary, Cather said she knew that New York had been raving about the play, but she thought it "just as nearly no play at all as anything I ever saw." Mr. Drew, however, played a poor part very well, but Miss Adams was greatly overrated. "Oh, she is so abominably sweet; such a china kitten, you want to drop her to see if she will break." When The Merchant of Venice came to Pittsburgh, Mansfield's Shylock, she wrote, was not one of his greatest parts, but "as an actor he is just the same great Richard." Everything he did commanded respect and admiration.

Her review of James Herne's Shore Acres is particularly interesting in view of her general attitude towards realism. This play, generally regarded as the best realistic play written in America in the nineteenth century, pleased Cather. "It comes nearer than any other play to doing for New England life on the stage what Howells has done for it in fiction . . . . In this wicked and perverse generation that is so ridden by lbsenism and Zolaism on the stage and off, it is a good thing to see plays like Shore Acres and players like James A. Herne. They are like health to a sick man and remind one that realism is not absolutely a synonym for evil." This oblique compliment to Howells is one of the few bouquets she ever threw him. She thought his best-known novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, was a very dull book, and while she admitted Howells could create character, his people were always "very common little men in sack coats." She probably was generalizing from Howells when she wrote that the fault of most American writers is one of magnitude: "They are not large enough; they travel in small orbits; they play on muted strings. They sing neither of the combats of Atridae nor the labors of Cadmus, but of the tea table and the Odyssey of the Rialto."

While Cather was writing drama reviews for the Leader, she was sending back columns of music criticism for the Journal. For the first time in her life she was able to hear a great deal of music. Pittsburgh had a rich musical life. There was plenty of opera, symphony concerts, and a great deal of chamber and choral music. Her first column, sent back to Nebraska in December, reviewed Eve, an oratorio by Massenet, which delighted her. As she had no technical vocabulary or expertise to write about music, she resorted to the kind of impressionism she had used before. The music "comes in long, clear waves of sound like the glittering waves that break shoreward." The music is as "light as the mists on the hilltops." When the creation of Eve takes place "she is the mother of all things-to-be opening her eyes upon her world; it is Aphrodite rising from the sea foam; it is faultless beauty made of the sunshine and foam and the scent of roses blown seaward." Nice similes and imagery, but they hardly tell one much about the music.

When she reviewed instrumentalists, Cather showed her great interest in the personalities of the artists as well as her feelings about the music. The piano virtuoso Teresa Carrefio from Venezuela made a strong impression. "She bursts upon you like a vision from the south. Dressed in flaming yellow, her magnificent head set like Athena's own upon her firm white shoulders, her blue-black hair touched slightly with gray about the temples, and her eyes—ah, they are Spanish nights!" Then the music leaped on one with a fiery passion. The massive chords and octaves pursued each other up and down the keyboard "as if the pianist were trying to compass all sound at once, to fathom and exhaust all the possibilities of sound." Carrefio was playing Anton Rubinstein's Concerto in D Minor, about which Cather with her usual self-assurance declared, "There is nothing in modern romantic music that can touch it for grandeur and color."

Cather had her first chance to hear a Wagner opera during the spring of 1897 when Walter Damrosch took his opera company to Pittsburgh. Her interest in Wagner, which subsequently became a passion, began with what must have been a dismal week that included badly cast and poorly sung performances of Lohengrin, Götterdämmerung, and Tannhäuser. Cather sent back breezy descriptions of these disasters for the home folks in Lincoln. All the singers had colds, "which beset every singer who ventures into this foggy river atmosphere." Herr Kraus, who sang Lohengrin, had to stop in the middle of an aria for a coughing seizure, and "poor Frau Venus on her couch coughed until Tannhäuser's head which rested on her knee shook as if he had the palsy." The Elsa in Lohengrin was so fat that it was a wonder that any Lohengrin would "descend from the gleaming heights of Mt. Monsalvat to get her out of her scrape." And Cather reported that in order for Damrosch to afford Lilli Lehmann, who got a thousand dollars a night, he had to hire cheap singers for the other parts, and the chorus was abominable. Despite all these shortcomings the music was wonderful, "so beautiful . . . that one wishes the singers would not come on and spoil it."

Late in June Cather finished her year on the Home Monthly and went back to Nebraska for the summer, stopping off in Columbus to visit the Canfields, and was in Lincoln by the twenty-ninth. She spent the summer in Red Cloud, except for a week in the "wild west" in August. Writing Helen Seibel in July that the Home Monthly had been sold, she reported severing her connection with it. She would return to Pittsburgh in September to look for a newspaper job. Even though she was temporarily without employment, she seems not to have considered staying in Nebraska. She told the secretary of her class of 1895 the next year: "After spending the summer months of 1897 at home in Nebraska, I returned to Pittsburgh, leaving the Home Monthly at the expiration of my contract, to accept the more remunerative position of telegraph editor of the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, the largest evening paper in Pennsylvania.

On September 7, 1897, the Pittsburgh Leader telegraphed offering her a job at seventy-five dollars a month. She wrote Will Owen Jones asking him to get her transportation from Red Cloud to Lincoln and then on to Chicago. She said she had been writing stories that summer and getting on with them better than ever before, but she did not want to let the chance slip by to work full-time for the Leader. She did think she could write better in Red Cloud than anywhere, because in Pittsburgh she did the society act too much. Because Pittsburghers did not often take in strangers and she was as vain as the rest of her sex, she could not be a hermit there. But there were many summers ahead for writing, and in Pittsburgh there would be Calvé and Bernhardt and all the rest of the great. She was at the age of twenty-three far from ready to retire to a quiet corner to write. Besides, she was flattered to be offered this job when Pittsburgh was full of unemployed reporters. As far as journalism was concerned, she definitely had arrived.

A month after returning to Pittsburgh she wrote Louise Pound that she had expected to be the Leader 's drama critic, but a few days after her arrival the day telegraph editor had left for New York. Cather was asked to help do this work until they could get a man to take his place. She liked the work and had the wild idea of asking for the job herself. The management objected to her gender and inexperience, but she hung on and they said she could try. The work, she said, wasn't as thrilling as writing drama criticism, but the job was more responsible and remunerative. Her task was to edit and expand foreign cables. Foreign correspondents in those days did not file complete stories. She explained that a brief cable would come announcing the birth of a prospective duke of Marlborough and she would then have to supply a short history of the house. She also had to winnow the wheat from the chaff out of the vast amount of news that crossed her desk. The chief requisites were discretion, some general knowledge of foreign affairs and history, and the trick of writing headlines. She had trouble with the last. Then there were a dozen telegraph boys under foot all the time, and her copy was absolutely irrevocable once it went up the pneumatic tube to the linotype operators. She admitted that she was by nature slouchy and uncertain, and she thought Louise would appreciate how she had been on the race track since taking over the telegraph desk. Her efforts paid off, however, for the directors of the paper had met four days before and voted to give her the job permanently. She was now just one of the fellows and related with obvious satisfaction that the boys had given her a dinner to celebrate and another paper had run a story on her.

Thus the second year in Pittsburgh started off with a great burst of activity. Her hours on the telegraph desk were from eight until two, and she had the afternoons and evenings to herself to go to the theater and concerts and to write. Her six-hour stint, however, was strenuous. At one moment she had to hold the forms from going to press because some big news involving the king of Belgium was expected momentarily. Then she would be driven almost wild when some actress shot herself in Paris, and it was too late to get the story on the drama page where it belonged. The news would have to go with general coverage right next to a W.C.T.U. convention in Ohio. Then she had to think up different headlines for twelve suicides all at once. People, she said, showed such poverty of imagination in the way they killed themselves. But the political news was the toughest to handle. What was a person to do when one cable from Berlin reported that the kaiser had said thus and so and another from Vienna said just the opposite? The following summer she was still editing news on the telegraph desk, and because the Spanish-American War was going on, she had to postpone going home until August. She wrote in June that she had to stay in Pittsburgh grilling in the heat and writing headlines all about Cervera's being bottled up in Santiago Harbor. She thought the horrors of war were a good bit worse in newspaper offices than in the field.

The main event of 1898, however, was meeting Ethelbert Nevin. She may have met him through Mrs. John Slack, who lived lavishly in suburban Sewickley and gave musical parties to which Cather was sometimes invited. Her house and music room, which appear as part of the setting in "Uncle Valentine" (1925), were next door to Vineacre, the Nevin family estate. Or she could have met him through his brothers, who owned the Leader. In any event, the meeting took place in the winter after Nevin had returned from living in Europe to settle down at his boyhood home. Cather was charmed by him. He was her first real artist friend and in every way fitted her image of the artist. He had begun composing songs as a child, before he ever had studied music. His practical father had given him a musical education but then forced him to go into business. Escaping from this bondage, Nevin had become a restless world traveller, but wherever he went—Venice, Algiers, Boston—he wrote incessantly, turning out hundreds of musical compositions, often working at night, suffering from poor health most of the time. In an article Cather wrote on him for the Ladies' Home journal, she said: "Temperamentally Mr. Nevin is much the same blending of the blithe and the triste that gives his music its peculiar quality, now exultantly gay, now sunk in melancholy, as whimsical and capricious as April weather."

Nevin found Cather attractive and turned on his charm. She wrote Mariel Gere twice about him, describing him in such glowing terms that she admitted she sounded like a girl infatuated with a matinee idol. She said she had been spending a good bit of her leisure time with him, and he was about the most lovable man she ever had met. She was prouder of this friendship than she ever was of anything. He had a nobleness of soul that helped every life he touched. In her next letter she listed Nevin as the prince and king of all her Pittsburgh friends. That afternoon he had gone shopping with her, carried her bundles, and then bought her (in January) a bunch of violets as big as a moon. Think of it, she wrote, the greatest of American composers and a fellow of thirty with the face of a boy and the laugh of a girl. He actually was thirty-five, but to her he represented youth, vivacity, golden talent. When she returned from Red Cloud in the fall of 1898, Nevin telephoned to welcome her back to Pittsburgh and sent her a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets.

The shopping scene appears in "Uncle Valentine," and when Nevin died three years later his death was a bitter blow. She also put him into an earlier story, "'A Death in the Desert,"' as the fabulous Adriance Hillgarde, who shapes the tale but never appears on stage. The rather nasty portrait of Janet Oglethorpe, Uncle Valentine's ex-wife, has suggested to some observers that there may have been a rivalry between Cather and Anne Nevin, the composer's wife. The character of Janet is rather too much like Anne to be accidental. It is reasonable to conclude that Anne Nevin, who supplied the practical business sense her composer husband lacked, and Cather were opposites in temperament, as Cather and Roscoe Pound had been. Anne Nevin—who had a solid social position in Pittsburgh, two children, and a strong command of the situation—could not have felt threatened, but she may have felt that Cather came around too often. Nevin was dependent on his wife for her business acumen and for inspiration. He wrote his wife: "I am dependent on you. Miss Cather was right. My melody is you: my harmony is you." Cather realized this and said as much in a feature article in the Courier. Nevin thought enough of Cather to dedicate a love song to her, "The Silver Moon," and Cather wrote three poems in his memory, one of them, "Sleep, Minstrel, Sleep," beginning:
Sleep, minstrel, sleep; the winter wind's awake,
And yellow April's buried deep and cold.
The wood is black, and songful things forsake
The haunted forest when the year is old.

Also after Nevin died in 1901, Cather wrote the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal asking him to return to her the photographs of Nevin she had supplied for her article.

Cather's second year in Pittsburgh was as busy as the first. She continued to review plays and concerts, for which the paper paid her extra, and she covered special events. She also kept sending back columns to Nebraska, but this year she switched "The Passing Show" from the Journal to the Courier. She also conserved her energies by using the same material for both her Leader reviews and her Courier column. In October she wrote enthusiastically of John Philip Sousa's week of concerts at the Exposition Hall. Every newsboy was whistling music from his operetta El Capitan, and Cather "was inclined to thinkthat [Sousa was] the only man who has written music that is characteristically American." She was equally delighted with the Pittsburgh Symphony's playing of DvorÁk's New World Symphony. Its use of folk music, she thought, was splendid. DvorÁk had composed it in Iowa in 1893, and Cather first had heard it in Lincoln the following year. It made a great impression on her then, and she recreated this response in Thea Kronborg, who hears it at her first symphony concert when she is studying music in Chicago. When Nellie Melba appeared in The Barber of Seville, Cather was on hand to report the event. She was in rapture after the famous aria "Una Voce Poco Fa," which she described as "flawless perfection." "And it was sung as just one voice in all this world can sing it. One upon another they came, each sweeter than the last, those round, full unclouded tones, those notes of silver, shaken from her throat as lightly as the water drops from a sea gull's wing when it flies sunward in the golden dawn."

Cather's interest in the stage remained undiminished. When Minnie Maddern Fiske appeared in the dramatization of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, she thought it one of the "few really great plays" of the last quarter century. She even put it in the same class with the younger Dumas's La Dame aux Camélias. Mrs. Fiske's performance was worthy of the play: "Her triumph is one of absolute intelligence—of art." Her power was in "the naked truth and passionate sincerity of her work . . . . She appeals only to those who love the drama seriously as an art, not as a diversion." When Richard Mansfield introduced Shaw to America, Cather reviewed The Devil's Disciple, but she did not know exactly how to take Shaw. She found it impossible to judge him by ordinary laws of dramatic art because he violated all the rules, but she had to admit that "by its biting satire, its brilliant, whimsical intellectuality, [the play] achieves a distinct and startling originality which many a law-abiding drama woefully lacks. One thing is certain; from the Shaw and Mansfield combination nothing commonplace can ever come.

Cather also did general reporting from time to time. When President McKinley visited Pittsburgh, there was a great parade which Cather watched from the balcony of the Leader office on Fifth Avenue. She covered the event with her usual exuberance and noted that the crowds that greeted the chief executive's carriage seemed to love their president. As he passed through the streets, a cry went up "that will always echo in one's ears. It was so gigantic, this elephantine glee of the multitude, this transcendent passion of patriotism before which everything else is dwarfed and pale. It was like a mighty Wagnerian chorus." This demonstration took place just before the war with Spain, which the public was demanding, the "splendid little war," as John Hay, secretary of state, called it; and the president's popularity was running high. On another occasion Cather reported a lecture given by the Norwegian Arctic explorer Nansen and followed with an account of a banquet given in his honor. Although he had failed in his effort to reach the North Pole, he had come closer than anyone yet, and Cather thought him an authentic hero: "He went [for the Pole] because he was possessed of an old unrest, the Odysseus fever; because there sang in his blood that siren voice that is forever wooing us away from the life of hotels and theatres and electric lights, whispering to us of a larger liberty, of meeting Nature once more breast to breast, coping with her hand to hand."

Even though Cather was very busy with her new job and her reviewing, she was not chained to the telegraph desk all the time. She spent Thanksgiving with Dorothy Canfield, her brother Jim, and his fiancée in Columbus. Mr. and Mrs. Canfield were away, and the young people had a very social time with dinners, teas, and theater parties. At Christmas Dorothy and her mother came to Pittsburgh to visit. In February Cather made her first trip to New York when Franklin Fyles, the drama critic for the New York Sun, was ill and the paper invited her to be guest reviewer. Although she was only there a week, she thought she must have met every thespian in New York, but she did not much care for them. The high spot of the trip was lunch with Helena Modjeska, a delightful person whom Cather thought both a gentlewoman and a scholar. She had been interested in Modjeska ever since she had seen her in As You Like It in Lincoln six years before. She went to see her in New York in Schiller's Mary Stuart, which she reviewed for the Sun. Despite age and illness the great Polish actress's carriage was "beautifully graceful and dignified . . . queenly." "Nobody who sees Mme. Modjeska today . . . can fail to be impressed by the naturalness and simplicity of her method and its freedom from exaggeration." Younger actresses could learn a great deal from her. Many years later Mme. Modjeska appears at a New Year's Eve party in My Mortal Enemy much as Cather remembered her in 1898. Cather was offered a job on the Sun, but she found out it would be all night work, and besides, she wrote, she could not bear to leave her friends in Pittsburgh. She did not go to New York to stay for another eight years.

During the first two weeks of May she visited Washington for the first time, staying with her cousin Howard Gore, who was professor of mathematics at Columbian College (now George Washington University). This visit was more dazzling than she could have expected, for her cousin was getting ready to join the Wellman Polar Expedition and was busy saying good-bye to all his friends, many of whom were members of the diplomatic corps. Cather was thus on hand for a round of dinners and parties and wrote Frances Gere afterwards that she had met no end of interesting people. One dinner was with the Norwegian ambassador and diplomats from the German embassy, and on another occasion Cather went out to dinner with the chargé d'affaires of the Turkish embassy. She also was enchanted by her cousin's wife, the daughter of a former ambassador from Norway and a cousin of the king of Sweden, who was full of stories of court life in Scandinavia, sang Grieg's songs beautifully, and read from Ibsen like the tragic muse. Cather even talked of plans to visit Norway with her sometime. The busy round of social activities did not keep Cather from making the most of her opportunities and writing up the forthcoming polar expedition for the Associated Press.

Cather returned to Nebraska for two months' vacation in August. When she wrote a family friend at her mother's request, because she was a pencil-pusher by profession, she described activities in the Cather menage in Red Cloud. Jessica was playing waltzes on the piano, while she and Douglass danced. She and Roscoe were planning to leave for the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming for ten days of shooting. Roscoe was going to be principal of South Ward School next winter, and Douglass had just gotten a job in the Cheyenne office of the Burlington Railroad. She told another friend that she had learned to mix cocktails. When she went back to Pittsburgh in September, she was about to meet the most important friend of her life. She was still not yet twenty-five.

CHAPTER 7

Isabelle McClung and a New Career

Although the year 1898-99 was momentous for Cather, it began dismally. She no sooner returned from her summer travels than she came down with the grippe and for six weeks fought the virus without much success. Finally her doctor ordered her to go south to recuperate, but instead she decided she wanted the loving companionship of an old friend and went to Columbus. Dorothy Canfield, then a senior at Ohio State, was delighted to have her, pampered her, and after six days Cather was feeling like herself again. "She is a very different looking person from the parchment colored invalid who stepped off the train with such a cough," Dorothy wrote Mariel Gere in a letter that contains alternate pages written by both women. Cather reported that she had gone to Columbus hating the world and everyone in it. The next day after writing this joint letter she returned to Pittsburgh, and her first contribution to the Leader appeared on October 25. But she did not resume her column for the Courier until Christmas.

From the end of October until the end of July, when she returned home again, she contributed much less than usual to her papers in Pittsburgh and Lincoln. Whether her vitality was low or she was being paid better and did not have to write so much, the record does not say. In any event she wrote a book column about twice a month for the Leader and only occasionally reviewed plays. When she resumed her columns for the Courier, they also appeared about every other week. Meanwhile, there were no new stories appearing anywhere, nor would she place any fiction at all for another year and a half. This is a surprisingly barren period for one who had been writing so easily and with such demonic energy.

She apparently had one literary project in the works, however, an idea for a book that had resulted from her experiences as a theater and music critic. She decided to write a series of open letters to various stage personalities, letters that were assessments of the subjects' strengths and weaknesses. She put together such a volume and sent it off to a publisher, but nothing happened. The manuscript was considered by several publishers, but no one wanted to bring it out. Her cousin Howard Gore had encouraged her to produce the manuscript, but he was a mathematician, not a drama critic. She then sent it to Arthur Stedman, one of the minor New York literati, hoping that he could find her a publisher, but, as she wrote a year later to another New York friend, Leonard Van Noppen, writer and translator: "Stedman did nothing with the manuscripts except get them dirty and cause me a considerable loss of time . . . . [They] are now with R. H. Russell & Co. of New York. Do you happen to know any of his people? If you do I'd be mightily obliged if you could speak a word for them and ask him what he thinks of them. Rupert Hughes, of the Criterion, says they will surely go somewhere."

They did not, and it was perhaps just as well. The letters were all addressed to very active personalities who would not have been flattered by some of her remarks. Some of the things she had to say have survived because she published three of the letters in her "Passing Show" column. In the one addressed to Nat Goodwin, for example, she told him that he was a charming fellow but with a limited range—in short, an intellectual lightweight. She hoped he never would be tempted by his admirers to do Shakespeare's comedies; he wasn't up to them. Then she concluded: "At any rate we like you for what you are, not for what you might be; something of a scapegrace, a good deal of a vagabond, and just enough of an artist to redeem your qualities. You are incorrigible, sir, and I for one like you the more for it." Cather gave a copy of her manuscript to Dorothy Canfield, who found it among her papers twenty-five years later and asked what she should do with the letters. Burn them, Cather wrote back. If anyone ever got hold of them, she thought, they would be a prime source for blackmail.

One stage personality for whom Cather had only praise was Lizzie Hudson Collier, an actress she had first seen perform in Lincoln. She was the leading lady of the New Grand Opera Stock Company when Cather arrived in Pittsburgh, and the two women became good friends. Collier was enormously popular and was universally admired as an exemplary human being as well as a first-rate actress. To illustrate Collier's generous nature, Cather told her readers of an episode that had occurred when Collier was playing a role requiring a live baby. The woman who produced the child was a slum dweller who took her infant home to her tenement each night after the performance. On one particular night when the temperature dropped below zero Collier refused to let the mother take the ill-clad child home in such weather. She bundled the baby up in her furs and took it to her own hotel suite for the night. "When she arrived at 11:30, all dressed in black and carrying this unaccustomed burden through the snowy winter night," Cather wrote, "she looked for all the world like the betrayed and deserted heroine of a Bijou melodrama who returns to receive the paternal curse."

On another occasion, when Cather dropped into Collier's dressing room feverish with a severe bronchial cold, the actress insisted on taking her back in a cab to the Schenley Hotel and putting her to bed in her own room. Then she nursed her for several days, even though she was playing every night. Cather wrote of Collier after her first year in Pittsburgh: "I never come out of the theatre with her after a matinee that there is not a string of carriages lined up in front of the stage entrance full of worshipful girls, who wave and smile at her and gaze at me with green-eyed jealousy and deep-seated loathing . . . for here I am walking coolly with this 'popular idol' with my sordid, mundane little spirit fixed on nothing loftier than where we will go for dinner."

One day backstage in Collier's dressing room Cather met one of those worshipful girls. It was a meeting that changed her life, for the other Collier fan was Isabelle McClung, the tall, handsome daughter of a socially prominent and affluent Pittsburgh family. The two women were immediately drawn to one another, and the friendship that began that day grew into a great love that lasted a lifetime. They were inseparable companions during Cather's remaining years in Pittsburgh and spent a great deal of time together during the decade after Cather moved to New York. Two years after meeting her, Cather moved into the McClungs' large new house at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue, in the fashionable Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. She lived there for the rest of the years she remained in Pennsylvania, and later often returned there for extended visits. She had a former sewing room on the third floor as her study and spent many profitable hours writing there. The relationship between the two women changed inevitably after McClung got married in 1916, but their mutual love never diminished. Though they saw each other rarely in later years, they corresponded frequently. When McClung died in 1938, Cather did not think she could go on living, but after she recovered from her grief and reflected on the long years of friendship, she believed that McClung had been the one person for whom all her books had been written.

McClung was not an artist herself, but she had a passionate interest in the arts, and promoting Cather's career became one of the major interests of her life. Her background was stern Pittsburgh Presbyterianism, such as Cather had satirized, but she was not at all like her dour, conservative father, a tough judge of Scottish descent. While the McClungs lived expansively and expected their children to conduct themselves as well-behaved young socialites, Isabelle cultivated actresses, musicians, and writers. Judge McClung ran his family with a heavy hand, but apparently he found Cather, despite her frivolous vocation, acceptable as his daughter's friend.

There has been considerable speculation over the circumstances surrounding Cather's moving into the McClung house as a permanent resident. Did the family oppose this move? Did Isabelle threaten to leave home if she could not have her friend live with them? Did Cather's presence create friction among members of the family? The answer to all these questions is probably no. Edith Lewis thought that Isabelle "apparently had no difficulty in persuading her father and mother to invite Willa Cather to become a member of the McClung household," and although Lewis was not an unbiased witness, she was in as good a position as anyone to know. It hardly seems likely that Cather would have thrust herself into a domestic imbroglio. It was an unusual arrangement, to be sure, but there is no reliable evidence that it did not work out reasonably well. As time went on, Cather became close to the entire family. She was present in Pittsburgh for the wedding of Edith McClung and later corresponded with her. She also let Isabelle's brother manage some of her investments. The McClungs visited her in New York, and she was on hand and deeply concerned when Mrs. McClung had a near-fatal stroke in 1912.

The McClung house was large, elegant, solid, comfortable. Operated by a staff of servants, it provided a sharp contrast to the boardinghouses Cather had lived in in Lincoln and Pittsburgh or the cramped little house in Red Cloud overflowing with siblings. She had her own room on the third floor, where there was a bathroom, and her study was nearby. From the study she could look down to the garden and trees. The house sat high on a hill overlooking the roofs of other elegant homes, the tops of trees, flowerbeds, and shrubbery. No longer did she have to stand in line to use the bathroom or live in a house where cooking odors permeated the bedrooms. This was luxury that Cather enjoyed. She never had extravagant tastes, but she liked comfort and above all privacy. Dorothy Canfield Fisher remembered: "There was a good deal of stately entertaining carried on in the McClung house too, the many-coursed dinners of the most formal kind, which seemed picturesque (and they really were) to Willa." Her friends in Nebraska who feared she was living a Bohemian life need not have worried. Her career as a novelist was actually delayed by her desire not to cut loose and live in a garret while she learned the craft of fiction. But she did write the first stories that she thought worth preserving in her study on Murray Hill Avenue.

Details of the Cather-McClung relationship come from secondhand sources or from occasional comments in letters Cather wrote other friends. All of the hundreds of letters that passed between the two women were destroyed, except for three letters written from Europe by Isabelle late in her life. These three letters are warm and affectionate, demonstrating that the love between the two remained constant; but the recent suggestion that Cather retrieved her letters after Isabelle's death and destroyed them to remove incriminating evidence of a sexual relationship is probably without merit. Cather as she grew older became increasingly obsessed with privacy and determined if possible to confront posterity with only the works that she had prepared for publication. She destroyed all the letters she could retrieve from any friend who predeceased her. She would have destroyed her early stories and her newspaper writing if she could have.

Cather's love for Isabelle McClung has created considerable speculation about her sexual orientation. Contemporary frankness in discussing sexual matters inevitably raises the question of lesbianism. Was this friendship a physical lesbian relationship? Some critics believe it was, but there is no external evidence to support it. Indeed, there is not one reference to sexual relations in all the hundreds of her letters that have survived. If one defines a lesbian as a woman who has sexual relations with another woman, Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records. On the other hand, if a lesbian is a woman whose primary emotional attachments are to other women, regardless of sexual relations, the definition adopted by some feminists, then Cather was most certainly a lesbian. There is no disputing that her closest friends were women—Louise Pound first, then Isabelle McClung, later Edith Lewis, Zoë Akins, and Elizabeth Sergeant. After deciding not to marry Preston Farrar in 1898, Cather never had any close relationships with men whose friendships could or were likely to lead to matrimony. She was very close to her brothers and her father; to S. S. McClure, who was married and much older; and to Alfred Knopf, who also was married and young enough to be her nephew. It is impossible to say whether Cather's emotional ties to women resulted from inherent tendencies or from the fact that relations with women avoided involvement with male egos and the possibility of children. Critics are stating inference, not fact, when they say that "Cather was a lesbian who could not or did not, acknowledge her homosexuality and who, in her fiction, transformed her emotional life and experiences into acceptable forms and guises." Or who say she felt the need to be reticent about love between women in her fiction because "she bore a burden of guilt for what came to be labeled perversion." She knew, of course, that society regarded sexual relations between women as unnatural, as her early letter to Louise Pound implies, but this did not keep her from having close friendships with women or from living for nearly forty years with Edith Lewis. As Cather grew older, her high regard for traditional values, her strong sense of decorum, and her close ties to family would have been strong deterrents to anything she regarded as deviant behavior.

Cather's book notices during her third year in Pittsburgh show continuing interests and some new enthusiasms. When one of James's later long stories, In the Cage, came out, she reviewed it perceptively, called it a "remarkable story," and praised James's "sympathetic handling of his subject," the story of "a young lady telegraphist shut up for eight hours a day in a cage of a telegraph office . . . in a suburban district of London." She devoted two columns in the Courier, one in the Leader, and an article for the Home Monthly to Richard Realf, poet, soldier, and workman who had spent six of the "happiest years of his disordered life in Pittsburgh" and whose poems recently had been collected. He was a romantic, Byronic type who had committed suicide in San Francisco after a wasted life, and some of his poems she found powerful and poignant. The bitter, ironic poetry of Stephen Crane, however, she cared for not at all. When she reviewed War Is Kind, she wrote, "Either Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense of the apes."

Of considerably more interest are her reviews of Frank Norris's McTeague and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. One might expect Cather to dislike Norris's naturalistic novel of a San Francisco dentist destroyed by his inability to cope with life. But she began her review, "A new and a great book has been written," and went on to praise the minute descriptions of Polk Street as "convincing proof of power, imagination and literary skill" and the invention as "vigorous and bold." On the other hand, Chopin's novel was a great disappointment. She wondered why Chopin devoted so "exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme." There was no need for a second Madame Bovary, as she termed the novel, and she had no patience with the heroine, Edna Pontellier, who demanded "more romance out of life than God put into it." Women of the Bovary type, she wrote, "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." This response to the novel shows no sympathy at all for nineteenth-century women trapped in matrimony in a male-dominated society. It also reveals Cather's own belief in romantic love as a destructive force and helps to explain her own avoidance of entangling emotional relationships.

Two other novelists that Cather might have been expected to disparage but did not were Zola and Harold Frederic. Cather thought that Zola was perhaps the "greatest mind in France today," and she admired his courage in taking on the French establishment in the then-current Dreyfus affair. But "his greatness as a man," she wrote, "has not always been to his advantage as an artist." She had read Zola extensively and never had cared for the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart novels; yet in Germinal, which had just appeared, she thought the artist and theorist were in perfect balance and the result was "the greatest of labor novels." Frederic, who had died relatively young in 1898, was a realist whose novels Cather liked, despite her usual aversion towards realism. She reviewed his posthumously published The Market Place as a book worth reading and deplored the untimely death of a promising talent. In summing up Frederic's career, she recalled that his best novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which is about a Methodist minister's loss of faith, was for the first two hundred pages "as good as anything in American fiction."

Cather's occasional reviews of plays and musical events also gave her additional chances to extol the merits of her favorite actors and singers. She went to see Minnie Maddern Fiske, Julia Marlowe, Richard Mansfield, and Olga Nethersole on the stage. She reveled in Fiske's "penetrating intellect," thought Marlowe's Rosalind in As You Like It a marvel, enjoyed Mansfield's Cyrano de Bergerac, and found Nethersole's performance "interesting and artistic" in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, "the greatest play written in the English tongue for many a long day." This year Cather also had a chance finally to hear Wagner well performed when the New York Metropolitan Opera Company brought Lohengrin and Die Walküre to Pittsburgh with Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and the two de Reszkes in the casts. These performances were "something long to be remembered."

When Cather went home for the summer in 1899, she treated herself to a leisurely boat trip through the Great Lakes, about one thousand miles by water, with a day's stopover at Mackinac Island. She wrote Mariel Gere that she would be in Nebraska by August 6, but her mother, who was then living in Lincoln, was sick and she expected to have to spend all her time with her and probably would not get to visit with Lincoln friends. She was not alarmed about her mother but worried and felt her filial duty strongly. Whatever else she did during that summer is unrecorded, but she certainly did some writing. She tried a one-act farce, "The Westbound Train," that she gave to Sarah Harris for the Courier in September, and she perhaps wrote an important story, "Eric Hermannson's Soul," that she sold to the Cosmopolitan for publication the following April.

Although she had been a drama critic for six years, she had not tried writing drama since she was literary editor of the Hesperian. Reprinted in her Collected Short Fiction, "The Westbound Train" is a unique item in that gathering. She never tried writing a play again. It resembles nothing so much as one of Howells's little farces that she earlier had been rather contemptuous of. Taking place in the Union Pacific depot at Cheyenne, the farce consists mostly of a monologue by a woman en route to San Francisco to meet her husband. It involves mistaken identity, another woman, a misdirected telegram, and, of course, a happy resolution of the muddle. The little piece is an entertaining trifle; but humor is relatively rare in Cather's work.

She returned to Pittsburgh early in October 1899 to begin her fourth year in the East. She stopped off in Chicago en route to Pennsylvania to see Elia Peattie and to have dinner with Peter Finley Dunne (Mr. Dooley). Her first surviving letter to Dorothy Canfield was written on the twelfth from the McClung home on Murray Hill Avenue. Cather must have gone there to stay for a while after returning from Nebraska before finding herself another boardinghouse. Canfield by this time had gone to Paris with her mother and was beginning her graduate work in Romance languages. Isabelle McClung, two years older than Dorothy but four years Cather's junior, was taking Dorothy's place as the adoring younger friend. Cather reported to Dorothy that Isabelle had met her at the Union Station and they had been tramping about in the hills and listening to Walter Damrosch's orchestra.

By the fall of 1899 it is clear that Cather was getting tired of daily journalism. She had been writing for the papers since her junior year in college and was ready for a change. Her old friend Elia Peattie, whom she had known as a columnist for the Omaha World-Herald, was then in Chicago and was urging her to come too. Peattie, who had become a nationally published fiction writer, thought that there was no woman journalist in Chicago who could touch Cather. At that moment Cather rather thought she would go to Chicago, but nothing came of this project. It is likely that by spring Isabelle was reason enough for Cather to stay on in Pittsburgh. She remained and the following summer for the first time did not go home to Nebraska. After deciding to stay, she also made the decision to quit the Leader, and her last contribution to the paper appeared on April 19, 1900.

The appearance of "Eric Hermannson's Soul" in a large national magazine may have given her the courage to leave the paper. The story, a long and subtle one, is a very competent piece of fiction and marks a clear advance in her narrative skill. Returning to the world of Nebraska and the material of "On the Divide," it creates another blond giant as a protagonist but a much more complex character than Canute Canuteson. Eric is a young Siegfried who has emigrated to Nebraska at eighteen, worked in the fields, played his fiddle at all the dances, hugged the girls, and visited Lena Henson, a woman of dubious reputation. When a passionate exhorter from the fundamentalist Free Gospellers captures Eric's soul, he puts away his violin and becomes another one of the dull clods from the Old World "sobered by toil and saddened by exile." At this juncture beautiful Margaret Elliot comes out of the East to visit on the Divide. She meets Eric, is attracted to him, rides with him, and plays the organ for him, "probably the first good music he had ever heard."The hold of the Free Gospellers loosens. Eric falls in love with the accomplished Margaret. He agrees, at her urging, to play his fiddle again and to attend a dance she is giving before her departure for home. In doing so, he barters his soul, as he believes, for one evening of pleasure. The story ends with Margaret getting on the train and Eric, in possession of his soul, deaf to the reproaches of the Free Gospellers' preacher.

A bare plot summary does injustice to this tale. It is the way the material is handled and the careful management of detail that make the story significant. One notices first of all that Cather is beginning to possess her material and to handle it with a measure of aesthetic distance that makes one both see and feel the world of immigrant farmers on the Divide. The prairie, the grass, the fields of wheat and rye, the western sky—all are evoked, not simply described. In one particularly effective scene Eric and Margaret climb the windmill, as Willa and her brother Roscoe had done in the summer of 1893 when they visited Uncle George's farm, to view the clear night sky stretching away to the distant horizon, "which seemed to reach around the world." As they watch, the weary wind carries the heavy odor of the cornfields to them and the music of the dance sounds faintly from below. Before they descend there is one passionate kiss, which frightens Margaret and makes her draw back from the love she sees in Eric's eyes. There is tension in this scene and a skillful development of the conflict between East and West. The author's sympathies lie with the West, but she understands the pull of culture and civilization. Also, her developing technique is nowhere better shown than in a scene depicting powerful sexual emotion without exceeding the limits permissible in magazine fiction of that day. In a ride across the prairie one afternoon Eric and Margaret meet a pack of wild horses, and Margaret's pony nearly stampedes. Eric jumps off his horse, grabs the bit of Margaret's rearing pony, and while it is biting and kicking viciously, subdues it. The scene, which has an orgastic intensity, is followed immediately by Eric's declaration of love. The entire story is well conceived and well executed and avoids the sentimental ending of the standard Western, which Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) would inaugurate, in which boy gets girl and the happy couple ride off into the sunset together.

Even before her last by-line appeared in the Leader, Cather had made a change. She joined the staff of a short-lived, five-cent weekly paper called the Library. Charles Clark, a young man with literary ambitions, inherited twenty thousand dollars and launched the publication with great expectations and small realizations. The venture only lasted six months, until the money ran out, but during its brief life Cather contributed weekly stories and articles and was decently paid for her work. She wrote five stories, seven poems, and sixteen articles and essays, using her own name and five different pseudonyms. She also revised the early story "Peter" for its third appearance and reprinted "A Night at Greenway Court." The essays show a growing maturity and more leisurely composition, while the stories demonstrate that she was still trying out various subjects and themes. The essays include the article on Crane, the Brownville piece ("The Hottest Day I Ever Spent"), and the profile of Bryan. But she also wrote on opera personalities, pictures at the Carnegie Gallery, and "The Men Who Make the Pittsburgh Papers."

The five stories that appeared in the Library are not very important. "The Sentimentality of William Tavener" is the story with a Virginia memory already mentioned. "A Singer's Romance" is a reworking of the material in "Nanette, An Aside,"an opera-singer story, but this time told from the point of view of the singer rather than her maid. The singer foreshadows the fictional portrait of Nordica, which appeared sixteen years later in "The Diamond Mine." "The Conversion of Sum Loo" is another Chinese story set in San Francisco, where Cather never had been, and invites comparison with the earlier tale, "The Son of the Celestial." This time the protagonist is a Chinese businessman whose infant son dies after he allows his wife to have the baby baptized at a Christian mission. The pathos is feeble, and the story is certainly one of Cather's bad apples. "The Dance at Chevalier's" is also a poor story that Cather signed with a pseudonym. Dealing with the rivalry of a Mexican and an Irishman for the affections of the beautiful Severina Chevalier, it ends with the Mexican poisoning the Irishman. This story's only interest lies in its use of the French Canadian settlement north of Red Cloud that Cather later evoked memorably in O Pioneers! "The Affair at Grover Station" is a ghost story far more skillfully done than the early football story that Dorothy Canfield supplied the plot for in 1893. Again Cather explored the dark underside of romanticism, the world of the grotesque, which would become an important aspect of her late novels. As the narrator says, "It's a grewsome tale, and someway we don't like to be reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than our systems of philosophy can grapple with." The story has a deep-dyed villain of Oriental origin who murders the debonair station agent after quarreling with him over the beautiful daughter of a former Wyoming senator. The ghost of the dead man appears to the narrator and writes on a blackboard the clue to finding the body. When the body is found in a locked boxcar many miles away, it has chalk on its fingers. The story is a good yarn, set neatly in a framing device, and it no doubt owes its authentic command of technical railroading to Douglass Cather, who worked for the Burlington in Cheyenne.

After staying through the summer in Pittsburgh, Cather was ready by fall for a change of scenery. Writing Will Owen Jones from Pittsburgh on September 29, when she thought she soon would have to return to Nebraska, she said she had taken the position on the Library only temporarily. Though it was a good job, the problem was that her mother was sick again, and her family wanted to move to Lincoln. Her mother was too ill to load the cookstove, she reported, and she would have to do it. She expected to be in Nebraska by November to stay for the winter. Could Jones use her on the Journal ? She would not be too haughty to work for her old paper, and besides, she had lost the art of loafing and couldn't write verse and fiction all the time: about three or four days a week were enough. After that her head got muddy. Her letter concludes by saying that she had had a wonderful year, the happiest of her life so far. There were a lot of her things coming out in the fall, both in prose and verse, and the world was a good place to live in. She was exaggerating a good deal in the first half of her statement, as she published only the piece on Nevin in November and two poems in December, but she may already have sold "Jack-a-Boy" to the Saturday Evening Post, which printed it in March. Undoubtedly her growing love for Isabelle McClung added greatly to the sum of happiness of that year.

Instead of returning to Nebraska, however, Cather went to Washington. She stayed with her cousin Howard Gore and found a job translating letters and documents for the United States Commission to the Paris Exposition of 1900. Tom Outland's impressions of the national capital in The Professor's House no doubt mirror her memories of working in a government building at this time: "How it did use to depress me to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building [the War Department] at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish . . . . Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery." But Tom also remembered from his walks about the White House grounds in late afternoon "those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white columns and green shrubbery, and the [Washington] monument shaft still pink while the stars were coming out." Cather remained in Washington until about the middle of March, though she made a trip back to Pittsburgh for Nevin's funeral in February. As the writing habit was inveterate, she also became a Washington correspondent for the Journal and the Index of Pittsburgh Life, which had absorbed the defunct Library. Her Washington correspondence ran from December to March, after which she returned to Pittsburgh, moved into the McClungs' house, and became a high school teacher.

Her thirteen columns for the Journal and twelve for the Index reviewed plays and concerts, interviewed public personalities, covered art exhibitions, and described in general life in the capital. Her first column reported on the opening session of the Senate and another performance by Teresa Carreñio. Because Washington did not have a proper auditorium, Señora Carreño had to play in a church where the Ten Commandments were frescoed in red and yellow above her head. At one point she was studying them so intently that she almost missed a cue. But the concert was a success: it "came in like a lamb and went out like a lion," beginning with Mozart and ending with Liszt.

Although Cather went back to Pittsburgh to spend her usual Christmas with the Seibels, she was in Washington for most of the holiday season, which supplied material for her column. The weather was so mild that people went about without wraps, but "the street corners were gay with flower stands" and there was a "forest of Christmas trees and holly bushes about the old market place." The avalanche of Christmas presents that descended on President McKinley from admirers throughout the country interested her. "During the W. C. T. U. convention here I heard one lady complain that an oil painting executed by herself, which she had sent the President last Christmas, was nowhere to be found in the White House reception rooms."

The theater, as usual, occupied a great deal of Cather's attention. She went to see a production of Hedda Gabler just after Christmas, and in January she had the unusual opportunity to see Maude Adams and Sarah Bernhardt perform in the same play, Rostand's L'Aiglon. Ibsen was never one of her favorites, and she thought the tragedy in Hedda Gabler was unconvincing; but she reported that the young actress, Blanche Bates, who played the title role had an enviable intellectual grasp of the role and was "one of the most intelligentfaces among the actresses of the younger generation." After seeing Adams on Saturday night and Bernhardt on the following Monday, she wrote: "A complete analysis of the two renderings would be futile and would be little less than brutal to the young actress." But she made the analysis anyway, though she noted after panning Adams that her schooling had been "of the most superficial nature" and that her head had been "early turned by the indiscriminating adulation of a fatuous and fickle public." Bernhardt, on the other hand, after thirty-eight years on the stage still had the marvelous voice that French poets thirty years before used to write about: some of her lines "once heard cannot soon be forgotten." As for acting, in the duke's death scene Bernhardt "rose to absolute sublimity," while Adams failed utterly, getting from it only "cheap pathos."

For her last contribution to the Index Cather went to Georgetown to visit "one of the quaint 'literary landmarks' of Washington . . . the little red cottage . . . where for nearly fifty years Mrs. [E.D.E.N.] Southworth planned adventures for self-sacrificing chambermaids and noble, though affectionate factory girls." She confessed to her readers that she made the trip "in the spirit of jest," for the endless procession of novels produced by Mrs. Southworth belonged with the trashy fiction of Ouida and Marie Corelli that Cather never could stand. But she was rather humbled by the experience, as she reflected on the appalling amount of "physical labor the poor woman accomplished, sitting in the little library facing the river, writing thousands upon thousands of pages." Cather ended up marveling at the "passion for creative experiments" that drove Mrs. Southworth, and that artistically ended "just where it had begun." She doubted if Henry James himself was "more sincere, or whether his literary conscience [was] more exacting than was hers." Cather was no longer quite the brash, self-assured young critic she had been when she began her journalistic career.

About the time Cather was switching from journalism to teaching, two more of her stories appeared—"Jack-a-Boy" in the Saturday Evening Post (a magazine she later disparaged) and "Eldorado: A Kansas Recessional" in the New England Magazine. Neither story reflects much credit on her, but the former is interesting as a tribute to her youngest brother Jack, then eight years old. She always had special affection for this little brother, missed him when she was away from Red Cloud, and when he was ready for college, sent him to Carnegie Tech. The story is the sentimental tale of a little boy who moves into an urban apartment house and charms an elderly professor of classics, the Woman Nobody Called On, and the narrator, a female music teacher. After giving these characters a new lease on life with his winning ways, the little boy dies of scarlet fever. Post readers in 1900 probably found the pathos touching, but Cather had not yet learned how to inject sentiment without becoming sentimental. She was still under the deleterious influence of Nevin, who had told her that as a child he had been taught never to be afraid of sentiment. The other story, "A Kansas Recessional," also is hardly memorable. It concerns a scam in which a Virginia colonel, a former Confederate officer, is sold land in western Kansas. The story is told with heavy irony, with an O. Henry surprise ending in which the colonel gets his money back, but not much can be said for it. New England readers, however, may have been comforted to read about the horrors of life in Kansas and the misfortunes of gullible investors in western real estate.

Cather began her career as teacher at Central High School in March. Just how she got the job is not known, but she was a mid-semester replacement for a teacher who resigned because of ill health. Judge McClung may have heard of the opening and recommended her, as he and a senior member of the English Department were fellow alumni of Washington and Jefferson College. Also some of the members of the Pittsburgh School Board lived not far from the McClungs, and the judge may have suggested her to one of them. Or Charles Gerwig, then secretary of the Board of Education of Allegheny, across the river, may have been responsible. At any rate, the High School Journal reported in its Easter issue that "Miss Cather, another new teacher, has now taken Miss Heard's place in Room 19 as teacher of Latin, Algebra, and Composition." From March until the end of the school year in June Cather had to work harder than she ever had before to keep up with her classes. Teaching composition was a breeze, and Latin she knew well, though grammar never had received much of her attention; but algebra must have been an ordeal. She had taken four years to work off the freshman math requirement at the University of Nebraska, and having to teach algebra could only have cost her great effort. She really must have been weary of journalism to let herself in for this demanding schedule. When she returned to Red Cloud for the summer, she was worn out and had lost twenty pounds. She wrote the Seibels that she had not been able to see them before leaving because of the horrors of the high school final exams.

She was not too exhausted, however, to accept an invitation to be guest editor for the August numbers of Sarah Harris's Courier. This she did in July before leaving to spend several weeks in the Rocky Mountains. In the columns she wrote she discussed a wide variety of topics, including western railroads; the writer Ernest Seton-Thompson, whom she had met in Washington; the composers Edward MacDowell and Victor Herbert; the Chicago Art Institute; Eden Phillpott's new novel; small-town life; Homestead, Pennsylvania; D'Annunzio's novel Il Fuoco ; and Eleanora Duse. She wrote enthusiastically about MacDowell's music, but to ask Herbert for inspired composition, she said, was like "asking for champagne at a mutton shop." Yet, Herbert, as conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, had proved a good business manager, was popular with his musicians, and had pulled the orchestra out of debt. The Chicago Art Institute, Cather thought, was a wonderful museum performing a valuable service in public education. "There are thousands of people all over the prairies who have seen their first and only good pictures there." Her taste in art at this point ran more to Jules Breton's Song of the Lark and the peasant folk of Millet than to the ballet dancers of Degas.

Eden Phillpott was one of Cather's literary enthusiasms, and she greeted his Sons of the Morning as "a remarkable new book." She liked his sympathetic portrayal of the British yeoman and thought he was one of the few younger writers who could step into the shoes of Hardy, Meredith, or George Moore. She wished that there were some American writer who "could write of the American common people, the people on whom the burden of labor rested, who plant the corn and cut the wheat and drive the drays and mine the coal and forge the iron and move the world." American writers who did write about the people, she declared, "all write of trusts and strikes and corporations and man-devouring railroads, of the mere conditions of labor and not of men at all." She was calling for a writer of her own description, for she herself would in a dozen years begin writing of the people who "plant the corn and cut the wheat."

Cather was always interested in story-telling for children and had done great deal of it herself for her younger brothers and sister, but she took a dim view of the story-telling hours then becoming popular among children's librarians. "They tell the story of the Trojan War, omitting, the story Helen's elopement; the story of Faust expurgated for the youthful mind; the story of Napoleon's energy, maintaining a careful silence as to his ambition." These enthusiastic librarians were trying to abolish evil from literature for the benefit of young minds. She thought it did a child no service to keep him from "the knowledge that the world is a hard place to live in, and that he will have to do many difficult and distasteful things before he gets through with it."

Her account of Homestead, Pennsylvania, must have been eye-opening for Lincoln readers. She described in vivid detail the conditions in Potterville, the stockade within which lived the immigrant laborers who worked in Carnegie steel plant. The stockade had been built by Superintendent John Potter during the strike of 1892 to house scab labor—Germans, Slavs, Italians, Russians, blacks—while the union was being crushed. They lived there in a state of barbarism, seventy inmates in a six-room house, for example. When one worker got out of bed, another took his place, and on Saturday nights "the whiskey drunk in Homestead . . . would float an ocean steamer." She commented sardonically that the splendid library Carnegie had built at Homestead was used only by "the bosses and draughtsmen and office forces." The mill hands, who toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week, had no leisure to enjoy Carnegie's bounty.

When Cather returned to Pittsburgh in the fall of 1901, she resumed her duties at Central High School as a full-time English teacher. Perhaps she had been willing to put up with teaching Latin, algebra, and composition during the preceding spring because she knew there would be a resignation in the English Department in the fall. She remained at Central High for two more years, then moved across the river to Allegheny High School to replace her friend Preston Farrar, and taught there until 1906, when Sam McClure carried her off to New York to be one of his editors. Cather might have remained a high school teacher indefinitely if this had not happened. She wrote an old friend in 1940 that she liked to teach and could have stuck it out forever if McClure had not happened to see some of her stories. Apparently her plan was to use her spare time, especially her summer vacations, to write until she felt able to drop teaching and become a full-time writer. Her sale of stories to the Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post must have encouraged her to think she could do this. She also wanted to write a novel. Her salary was only $650 a year, certainly less than she had made at the Leader, but free room and board at the McClungs' more than made up the difference.

Central High School was a dismal, grimy structure on a bluff overlooking the Union Station. There were four stories of gray stone topped by two ugly towers. It seemed to Emerson Graves, the title character in "The Professor's Commencement," a story Cather published the year after she began teaching, like "a fortress set upon the dominant acclivity of that great manufacturing city, a stronghold of knowledge in the heart of Mammon's kingdom." In the fall and winter, fog from the river and smoke from the soft coal burned by Pittsburgh industries made the city dark and dirty. Sometimes street lights had to be turned on in mid-day. The trains passing below added their share to the noise and filth. "Often, when some lad was reading aloud in the classroom, the puffing of the engines in the switch yard at the foot of the hill would drown the verse and the young voice entirely." The inside of the building was old and decrepit-floors worn down, walls defaced, and one had to climb three dingy flights of stairs to get to Cather's room on the top floor.

Although "The Professor's Commencement" concerns the reflections of a high school English teacher on the eve of retirement, his attitude towards his work and his students is Cather's. "Nominally he was a professor of English Literature, but his real work had been to try to secure for youth the rights of youth; the right to be generous, to dream, to enjoy; to feel a little the seduction of the old Romance, and to yield a little." Many of Cather's students no doubt were like the professor's students, "boys and girls from the stories and offices, destined to return thither, and hypnotized by the glitter of yellow metal. They were practical, provident, unimaginative, and mercenary at sixteen." But not all.

One of her most famous students, Norman Foerster, who became a well-known critic and professor of American literature, remembered her as a teacher whose manner seemed natural and human, but without contagious sparks. "Her voice was deeper than is usual; she spoke without excitement; her manner was quiet, reposeful, suggesting reserves of energy and richness of personality." Another student recalled that Cather was "one of the very few young teachers in a faculty of gray-haired veterans." Still another remembered that her manner towards students was very forthright. She called the boys by their last names, which was unusual, and demanded their attention with a no-nonsense approach.

When her students walked into her classroom at the beginning of the school year, they found a rather masculine young woman sitting on her desk. She told them her name was not pronounced "Kyther" or "Kayther," but it rhymed with "Rather." Her voice was deep. She wore the starched shirt waists that her journalistic colleagues were familiar with, sometimes Buster Brown collars with red or black ties knotted four-in-hand or Windsor style, and a skirt short enough to show her ankles. One day they saw blue stockings with white polka dots, another time spats. She walked about her classroom with a manly stride, wore shoes with rubber heels, and talked to her students with thumbs in belt or pockets. She had already begun to comb her hair back in pompadour fashion, and when she finished a discussion, she smiled. Her students remembered "beautiful, even white teeth."

As a composition teacher, Cather knew that the only way to learn to write was to write."She set us to writing themes, one every class day, usually in the first ten minutes of the period." The subjects were simple: "My First Party," "An Italian Fruit Stand," "My Favorite Play." She red-penciled "fine writing" of the kind she had indulged in as an undergraduate in college. She probably was thinking of her former pupils when she wrote her well-known essay "The Novel Démeublé" twenty years later and referred to "that drudge, the theme-writing high school student." Her method was "designed to teach us first to observe carefully, then to describe and narrate clearly." She was hard to please and graded themes severely. She seldom gave a grade of more than 85 and that