58.

the carbon of a poem which showed how the wheat country had
seemed when she returned from the Southwest.

"Evening and the flat land,
Rich and somber and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long, empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk."

This is the poem -- entitled "Prairie Spring" -- which
stands at the beginning of "O Pioneers!" It suggested to me
that Willa Cather was suddenly in control of inner creative
forces which had tended to swamp her and make her dismal so long
as she could not use them. The vast solitude of the Southwest,
its bald magnificence, brilliant light and physical impact, too,
had had the effect of toning up her spirit, and had made avail-
able a path in which a new artistic method could evolve from
familiar Nebraska subject matter.

After all, it had been in the little undistinguished
prairie town, which she had left at twenty-two in a cloud of
dust, that she had had the appointment to meet the rest of her-
self, and the literary fate she harbored, which she still knew
very little about.

59.

(WHITE SPACE)

Willa was deeply involved with her task when I next
heard from her in August from the McClungs' in Pittsburgh, a
shut-in place where, established in emotional security with a
sympathetic woman friend, the tempo of her inner music could im-
perceptibly change from the *crescendo*, *crescendo* of the South-
west to the *molto moderato* of Pittsburgh's wet and somber skies.

She was working three hours a day -- for her a normal
day's work. She was getting a lot of sleep. She and Isabelle
were reading aloud the ninth volume of Michelet -- six volumes
further on than in March. They also read my French sketch
"Standards of a Bourgeois Family" in the August *Scribner's*, and
had good things to say of it. "The Bohemian Girl" had come out
in the July *McClure's*. One reader wrote in to the effect that
Willa Sibert Cathér was Procuress to the Lords of Hell (quoting
Tennyson). But on the whole the letters to the magazine about
this story, and the serial also, were so warm, and the new work
went so amazingly well that she was freed from her editorial
servitude, this time for six months -- which, in fact, proved suf-
ficient for the completion of "O Pioneers!"

I had gone to England by autumn and then to Paris,
where I lived on the rue de Sevres, chez Madame Gaston Paris,
the widow of a great mediaevalist professor at the College de
France. In this intellectual and aesthetic environment, huddled
over a *boulet* fire, looking out on a closed garden where roses

60.

still hung and chrysanthemums scattered their leaves, I heard
from Willa that she was on the home stretch. The cold Swedish
story she had written in the autumn, Alexandra's story, had en-
twined itself with the Bohemian story, "The White Mulberry Tree",
and somehow she had on her hands a two-part pastoral: the most
foolish endeavor imaginable, she mourned. She now thought of
calling the book by Whitman's line: "O Pioneers!"

She knew, as she proceeded, that it was much better
than "The Bohemian Girl", She spoke of a murder -- she was
three days killing off the lovers, she mentioned rather lightly.
The reference was to that moment under the mulberry trees, when
the wild Bohemian farmer, Frank Shabata, shoots his wife Marie
in the arms of the tender, frustrated young Swede Emil -- a
scene that by its passion and its tragic restraint has taken its
place as a lasting passage in American literature.

So 1912 ended for Willa with the knowledge of an inner
achievement. Once this was reached, she had made the turn, as
if unconsciously, and found herself at a new level of the spiral
of work and living.

61.

CHAPTER FOUR

0 Pioneers!

1913

As 1913 opened, Willa settled herself, for many years,
as it proved, into an apartment at Number Five Bank Street; so
she always wrote it, in her firm, level, succinct small longhand.
A letter from her was a personal thing, and with its even mar-
gins and fine script a pleasure to the eye, as well as to the
mind. She never typed personal letters. Her handwriting looked
open as her face, at first sight. When one hit an obscure spot,
it was worth puzzling over.

At this time, Bank Street was in a quiet demure almost
soundless corner of Greenwich Village. No big arteries brought
traffic coursing by, no movie houses intruded. Willa was fana-
tical about noise, and in 1913, peace and security reigned.

Miss Edith Lewis, now Willa Cather's literary executor,
who companioned a genius through many books and years, had made
the happy find of the apartment during the previous summer. It
had good woodwork, good windows, a fireplace and a single flight
of stairs. Her last stay in Pittsburgh had been shadowed by Mrs.
McClung's illness; she looked forward to a home of her own that
satisfied her. Miss Lewis had a magazine job that took her out
early in the morning. Willa did the marketing (Jefferson Market
was close by) and then, in perfect solitude, her stint of work

62.

before the maid came to get the lunch. She was, indeed, "all set", in more ways than one. The Society Library was only across Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Opera just up Broadway. Her book was nearly done, and it had started her on the way of no return.

Though "Alexander's Bridge" was doing well enough, Miss Cather's ladylike Jamesian days of writing about the best people in merely sophisticated settings were over. Gone was her bitterness about the Anglo-Saxons of Red Cloud and their limitations -- at least for the present. "You must know the world before you can know the village," Miss Jewett had said. Well, now she did know the world and her pen, of its own volition, started unwinding the Swedish, Bohemian and French lives of the Divide, as memory presented them from pristine childhood memories. Inspiration, says Bantayana, comes from the heart and is, at the outset, as blameless and courageous as life itself.

Willa did not tell me that she had written of these foreign neighbors for college periodicals. She was, when interrogated about early work, transformed into a wooden image. Her beginnings just did not count. We know that her little room in "The Rose Bower" in her parents' home was locked when she went to college -- something hard to enforce in a large family in a town where everybody was interested in everybody else's business. The Cather parents had unusual insight into a rebel daughter. Her great friendliness, her contrasting susceptibility, her drive, her perplexing secretiveness and detachment made her no easy girl to raise. Surely they suspected that their eldest

63.

child had a special destiny waiting for her.

## (WHITE SPACE)

Some time before I went to Europe I had seen my friend during a moment of convalescence and consequent gloom and self-disparagement. Indeed, I had shepherded her back from Boston on a Pullman in this typical downhearted state of mind in which, through physical illness, she had, in a way that was baffling to me, lost her own self-respect. With our chairs turned toward the moving landscape, we watched the flying fields and blue bays, till at last sentiency took over in her, she cast her mood like an old skin, and accepted the world as good again.

Suddenly she remarked: "Now *you* must write a novel."

I said timidly that I lacked the imagination. But, she replied in her positive, assured, blunt way, *imagination is not necessary* -- all you need is the insight and the style you give evidence of in your French sketches. But I said those were French people -- if I wrote about neighbors friends or New England family I should hurt their feelings -- what does one do about that?

Willa said she did not like hurting people's feelings either -- we all want to be liked. She implied that her characters were largely composites. How "close to life" the characters in "O Pioneers!" were I was never to know with exactitude from herself, in spite of our many talks about the book.

64.

Though Willa had apparently not conceived "The White Mulberry Tree" when she started for the Southwest in March, 1912, she did have, in first draft, Alexandra Bergson's story -- the story of the vital young Swedish pioneer woman who took on the master work of producing a successful farm out of land largely untilled and with stupid brothers who could not see or feel the future in the untamed prairie. The Swedish manuscript ended, Miss Lewis has told me, with Alexandra's dream which came to her when she was overtired: the fantasy of being lifted and carried bodily, like a sheaf of wheat, by a man she never saw, great in stature, yellow as the sunlight, with the smell of ripe cornfields about him. This man relieved Alexandra of all weariness.

* * * * *

Willa sent to me in Paris early in 1913, shortly after New Year's, the typescript of her new story. She said the book was more than twice as long as "Alexander's Bridge" and there was some hasty writing in it -- and a lot about crops and farming. But it was either a fair success or an utter calamity. Maybe it had too much the tempo of "The Swiss Family Robinson"?

Anyhow, she had done what she cared to do without concern for consequences or critics, submitted herself humbly to her own creative impulse, dismissing all preconceived ideas as to what a novel "ought" to be. She had let the story run along at its own pace and length, without trimming it to pattern. The country insisted on being the Hero and she did not interfere,

for the story came out of the long grasses, she felt, like Dvorak.

65.

for the story came out of the long grasses, she felt, like Dvorak there, but something had to happen to herself before they based on Negro melodies. She knew better. Dvorak had actually spent time in Nebraska, in the Eighties. Yes, her themes were all there, but something had to happen to herself before they could rise up and reach her ear, and take form in her mind.

But, she quickly recanted, she was just boasting (be-
would be concerned. Yet it was the story that had teased her
something and got separated from it. Exposed to a cold, windy
world. Not more than half a dozen people in the United States
would be concerned. Yet it was the story that had teased her
for years and she could not bear to fail.

writing -- if I found any, come down on it hard. She was not one
judgment she valued (naturally, this went to my head), she begged
created. Should "The Bohemian Girl" be published in the same
volume, on did this stand best alone?

who took offense -- she could be detached from something she had
created. Should "The Bohemian Girl" be published in the same
volume or did this stand best alone?

I was to pass the story on to an agent in Paris who
might get a translation for it.

Since "O Pioneers! had to me the sobriety, force, and
freshness of a literary discovery, I decided to try it out on
the French cultivated mind. After déjeuner, chez Madame Gaston
Paris, the family gathered about the salon fire for an hour of
fine needlework and conversation. So it was that the old mother

66.

of ninety, Madame Paris in her sixties, a young daughter in her
early twenties, listened with poised attention to the reading of
"O Pioneers!" They had all read "Piers Plowman", Chaucer and
Walt Whitman in English and were genuinely thrilled by the emer-
gence of an indigenous American novelist.

<u>Très original!</u> Alexandra interested them. No French-
woman for centuries had seen virgin land. Alexandra's return
from the river farms singing a Swedish song, sure of the future of
the wheat on the Divide, was poetry and legend. For the first
time, Willa Cather wrote, since the land emerged from the waters
of a geologic age, a human face was set toward it with love and
yearning. "The history of every country begins in the heart of
a man or a woman." The French listeners thought the history of
Nebraska had now found the right heart to come to birth in.

"We French who love the land, have it in our bones,
can see the quality of her writing..." They thought the American
agent who had refused "O Pioneers!" for French translation asinine,
they prophesied that this American friend of mine, with her acute
poetic sensibility, would soon be known to the cultivated French
reader.

In the grey, wet months that follow Christmas in Paris,
I arranged to go to the South of France with a friend who came
from London to join me -- Mrs. James F. Muirhead, wife of the
Scotch editor of "The American Baedeker", and author of "The
Land of Contrasts". Helen Quincy Muirhead was an "old" Bostonian
with a difference. Whether one stayed with her near Hampstead

67.

Heath, or was drawn into her circle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one was offered the varied fruits of a rare intellectual curiosity and detachment. H.Q.M. had a generous yet eclectic literary taste joined to a compassionate, searching interest in many kinds of human beings.

My first knowledge of the works of Henry Adams had appropriately come from this Quincy. She loaned me, soon after I left Bryn Mawr, his "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres" in some privately printed form, and later his autobiography. Since we were both "Jamesians", H.Q.M. had taken me with her to the stately home of Miss Grace Norton, the Queen Victoria of Irving Street, opposite neighbor of William James and Josiah Royce, and sister of Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Shady Hill.

It delighted H.Q.M. that Henry James had confided some of the early inner questionings he lived through in deciding to become an expatriate, to this now dumpy, scholarly old Cambridge lady. Miss Norton had worn caps since she was thirty, learned Greek at seventy, and even now rose at six to carry on her literary correspondence before breakfast, in order to devote the morning to her work on Montaigne.

Max Beerbohm's cartoon of "Lord Tennyson Reading 'In Memoriam' to His Sovereign" suggests the tiny, plump, authoritative figure we gazed at across her Victorian carpet. In this instance it was the Sovereign who benignantly read to her subjects, H.Q.M. and me. In spite of Miss Norton's discreetly maternal excisions and revelatory passages, the matter we heard made clear to us just why the first fiction writer of his American time had had to leave

68.

the land where an *Atlantic Monthly* editor, W. D. Howells himself urged the "happy ending". In Europe, Turgeniev and George Eliot were still there, to sanction H. J. if in a story, as in life, Fate showed a dark wing.

Willa had inquired eagerly about these early James letters. She had met H.Q.M.'s witty sister Fanny (Mrs. Mark Howe) at Mrs. Fields' and I divined that I might venture to show Mrs. Muirhead the manuscript of "O Pioneers!" on our Riviera trip. Willa was still in need of reassurance about her lump of Nebraska soil, as she termed her new story. She said she had written it only for herself -- then I had unaccountably liked it, and Ferris Greenslet had too, against all her expectations -- he was rushing it to publication in June. But somehow she was down about it now, and would welcome more comment from me while there was yet time.

H.Q.M. immediately reacted to Willa Cather's spontaneous unpatterned novel as Justice Holmes, much later on, did to "My Antonia". It made her sense the core of her own Americanism, and feel prouder of her country, that these people of European stock, who brought their *mores* and their hopes to the Nebraska Divide, so quickly blended their lives with its deep red stains.

The story of the pioneer Puritans, "our over-rated progenitors" (after all they were middle-class malcontents, chock-full of narrow prejudice) had been a hundred times told, H.Q.M. said, like the story of the covered wagon days. But this fiercely untamed, untrammelled, sweeping natural world of the Divide, of which

69.

the author gave such rare and measured visual images, had new cosmic vistas, overtones and undertones; there was no place for the "otherness" of an individual destiny -- like that of the passion of Marie and Emil -- which did not serve the earth in process of subjugation by human hands and bodies. Though the story unfolded with deceptive simplicity, it had majesty, even terror. The author seemed to be looking through objective lenses at something new God had made.

After H.Q.M. went back to London, I journeyed north up the Rhône, still with "O Pioneers!" in a bag I kept under my eye and settled myself for the spring in Avignon, which happened to be one of Willa's favorite towns in all the world. Springtime really is merry sensuous expansive in Provence; one has to give in to it, and merge with it -- harsh one day with bitter, biting cold mistral, warm rioting and expanding the next, like the speech of the Provencaux who always "languish" for everything, as I wrote Willa. *Je languis de te revoir, je languis de me promener avec toi, dans les Alpilles.*

Willa replied, mourning that she was not with me drinking a *petit verre* in the Place de la République in Avignon and catching the jolly come-on-with-you gleam in a French soldier's eye... If I wrote her of the yellow krises flaming in the ditches, and the tall black cypresses piercing the blue like arrows, she matched me with the yellow mustard in the tragic theatre at Arles and the little willows resting their elbows in the flooded Rhône. Her most splendid memory was of the Rocher des Doms and its virginal, golden above the great river, finest in the world, maybe.

70.

Did the same swirling mighty current rush past the old Pont d'Avignon?

How Willa loved all that waspotent, mighty in Nature!
My first view of her at McClure's had brought that vision of red
earth. Her future might prove as broad as the windy spaces of
her state which, thanks to her gifts of memory and description,
now lived in my mind as a concrete backdrop for her Eastern life.

When I let her know that the only flaw I could find in
"O Pioneers!" was that it had no sharp skeleton, she swiftly
replied, true enough I had named a weakness. But the land has no
sculptured lines or features. The soil is soft, light, fluent,
black, for the grass of the plains creates this type of soil as
it decays. This influences the mind and memory of the author
and so the composition of the story. Some time, Willa promised,
there would be a story with sharp clear definite lines like the
country in which I then was...

More, more, tell her *more* about Provence. Like the
Southwest it was a land that made one mad with delight. There
*was* plenty more, especially about the Provençal poets, artists
and writers whom I met through my French literary friends in
Paris; or through my Scotch hosts at the Avignon pension. Through
staying with the Soeurs Gardes Malades in Arles I had also fallen
into a little nest of Catholic clergy, red-cheeked, devoted,
hearty men in black *soutanes* who loved good living and shot quail
and grouse in the Camargue. It was in company of two cures and
a Sister Superior that I went to Maillane, that green village on
a dusty plain where the old poet Mistral, with his goatee, and

73.

his sombrero on the back of his head, was drinking eau sucrée in his garden. He did so closely resemble "Boofalo", as he called Buffalo Bill, that the two of them had once bowed low and exchanged hats in a Paris café, he told me.

The Curés presented me as an Arlesienne, taking much pleasure in this innocent deception. The Sisters had made me into a perfect counterfeit of the native article, head-dress, fichu, black bodice, full skirt and Roman nose included. Mistral was so pleased that he promptly invited me to attend the forthcoming Fêtes of his literary group, the Felibrige, who wrote in the native dialect.

I must have written Willa about all this light-hearted initiation into the poetry and legend of the land; about my walks with Provençal artists and writers in the dry Alpilles; and how my portrait was painted by a Cubist from a vineyard — *un sauvage*, a wild man, he called himself, a "Fauve" who had exhibited in New York in the first Armory show of "modern" art from France.

Willa was intrigued, especially by the Cubist. She determined I should expound modern art to her. She had been urging me to stop with her at Number Five Bank Street when I landed in late June, and this was now arranged.

She hoped I would like her new home... I would find that she had had to become separated from "O Pioneers!" get it out of her system by seeing it through proofs and into press, before she could be clear enough to admit to herself that she really wanted to do a very different kind of story!

72.

This surprising remark undermined all my ideas about
Willa's treading in the footsteps of Sarah Jewett, and writing
of a region. What next then? She talked more and more in her
letters of a new enthusiasm of hers, the Metropolitan Opera star
Olive Fremstad. I had certainly heard Fremstad sing Kundry,
Isolde and other Wagnerian roles? Fremstad, born in Sweden,
grew up in Minnesota, but she had the rebellious dubious eyes,
far-scanning and keen, of the pioneer woman on the Divide -- and
an intelligence that challenged you and put you sharply and
brusquely on your mettle. Willa wanted to tell me more about
Fremstad when I got to Bank Street.

She ended by thanking me for caring for her book, for
wanting to care for it, but even more for caring about the whole
thing -- that is the art of creative writing.

84.

great countries, like New Mexico - I don't mean countries..."

"Yes, you do - Provence and the Southwest too are more
than provinces or regions or states... think of the foreign ad-
venturer and discoverers and civilizers they have lured..."

"And don't they need to be incarnated in human beings -
who seem almost <u>reincarnations</u> of the historical figures of the
past - to be human to us?"

Willa looked reflective. We agreed that neither of us
went on our travels to get "material" - since material was every-
where. One of us recalled a folk tale about a man who journeyed
far away to hunt a buried treasure fruitlessly - he found it at
last buried behind his own kitchen stove.

We who were impelled to take the train or the boat, if
we were honest, avowed that we went not just for joy or aesthetic
delight or knowledge of new cultures - or old ones. Our eyes
were watching and our hearts longing for - well say Mistral,
that bardic figure; or the ancient wrinkled, vital Fabre, study-
ing the emotional lives and the habits of the cicada through his
bright, narrow, impassioned eyes, as he drank his _eau de vie_ and
crumbled his bread. Even my wild friend the once-cubist took
on something of the _hauteur_ the Romans who came to Provence
built into their bridges and aqueducts, when he surveyed his
work; he sang a song in a mode the Greeks had left behind them
in the vineyards of the Rhone, when he trampled out the mash
with the peasant maids at vintage season.

84-A

Willa's source of romance and longing and frustration as a child were the long steel tracks of the railroad that stretched on into the farther West and Southwest, where the Conquistadors had gone. The neat conductors and jaunty brakemen who jumped off the panting trains for brief business or refreshment were her friends; it wasn't just a happenstance that she found a literary brakeman and a Cockney cook from London at Rosecoe's *casa* in god-forsaken Winslow - or that she dashed to the wrong side of the railroad tracks to discover those Spanish singing musicians, full of that old, old courtesy and that equally old, old folk music that binds the human race together.

Then there was the priest, a Frenchman, with his pocket full of lettuce seed, who drove her to the village under the blue shoulder of the primitive mountain where he was to hold mass and confess, and pointed out the stone circle lying below in the valley where horned goats were trampling out the wheat... as in a Virgilian eclogue.

105.

teas. She seemed to have no "circle" of intimates, whose vibrations and exchanges arose from propinquity and mutual converse in a given social or literary milieu.

Willa never in the world sought to use her growing success and reputation to dip into the realm of "Society" or "Important People". Important to whom? She cared about musicians, actors, singers, and sometimes painters and writers - *if she admired them individually*. Not otherwise. What she was accumulating without came from within, so to speak: and that made her tea worth drinking and the talk at Number Five generous and human.

Willa avoided discussion of her own work in any general group. She was, however, now finishing *The Song of the Lark*, going through the last throes of revision. Randolph Bourne, the young illumined liberal with the sad hump on his back whom I had met at *The New Republic's* Round Table lunches, was eager to read it, and as he was musical, might review it. He had enormously admired *O Pioneers!*.

In the psychic stress that prevailed in this group of men who were trying to forge group feeling and a policy that would fit our national and world dilemma, War in Europe, Bourne spoke up for literary values against war madness, and pitted the younger against the older generation in a way to make one stop and take notice.

Alvin Johnson also, Scandinavian pioneer descendant that he was, with his western bluffness, his mind of genial breadth, was also interested in Cather, whom he had known at the Univer-

110.

Ach, Ich habe sie verloren,
... Euridice, Euridice.

Soon after, on her thirteenth birthday, Wunsch is moved
to bring his pupil to read and interpret a lyric of Heine and
impatiently, angrily tries to enlarge her insight to accept a
mystery:

"What makes the rose to red, the sky to blue,
the man to love. In der Brust, in der Brust it is..."

Had the novel ended here, Thea's story might be accounted
one of the great perfect works of Willa Cather, rather than the
imperfect, paradoxical thing it became when she ventured all in
trying to join the finality of her own childhood experience to
the apprehended, vicarious experience of a mature artist in the
great field of singing. She dreaded from the first page of the
book that she must - as she thought - push Thea out onto the
Opera stage, where even a small-town intelligence would recog-
nize her success. Later, as she told us in the preface to the
revised edition of the book, she regretted this herself.

Thea's student stage of shattering and wounding and
aspiring apprehending - she studies piano and then voice train-
ing in Chicago - is so vitally conceived that the emotional im-
pact on the reader is again poignant. I can think of no other
book about a woman artist where the psyche on its inner shadow
side is revealed with such honesty and conviction. We still
care with all our hearts what the singer at the threshold of her
art is going to do with her gift and her life. But when we go
with her to the Canyon of the Ancient People, to meet the brewer's

111.

son, it is the cliff city, it is the canyon, with its brooding
presences and powers, that awakes Thea's passion and her nature.
The rich, blonde young male is rather incidental. Characteris-
tically, it is Dr. Archie, who conjured so many meanings for
Thea in her childhood, who lends her money to go to Germany
to study with Lili Lehmann.

It is, also, Dr. Archie who drags the truth about her
personal life out of Kronborg, the prima donna, in a moment of
high triumph at the Metropolitan Opera. He is anxiously query-
ing her about it:

"My dear Doctor, I don't have any. Your work be-
comes your personal life, you are not much good till
it does. It's like being woven into a big web. You
can't pull away because all your little tendrils are
woven into the picture. It takes you up and spins
you out; and that is your life. Not much else can
happen to you."

This theme, which can be defended but also seriously
 queried, was again taken up by Miss Cathér, in her Preface as I
 have just said. She regrets having written Thea's life in full -
 for what she cared about was the struggle and not the success:
 the awakening of the girl's spirit, not its worldly triumph.

But even in her Preface the author still believed,
apparently, that a great opera singer must sacrifice the woman
in her to her fame. The something final, dry and ruthless that
happens to the mature diva far removes her from the intense,
passionate, richly endowed child of twelve. The author herself
hardly seems conscious of the split. Could it have been the

153.

Of the four singer pieces I frankly enjoyed most the atmospheric and romantic story that recalled the good old artist days in Washington Square, when horses drew the buses and a handsome young singer not yet on the billboards could have her first affair with a painter still unknown to fame. The two stories, which go to make a portrait of Cressida Garnett, dig deep into the psychological aura of a singer with a fine voice and no great musical intelligence: a woman pushed from behind a designing Svengali-like accompanist; and worried out of her gains by a clinging trail of family leeches.

In the winter of 1921-22 I was back again in Tenth Street, after a long stay in Tesuque Valley and in Santa Fe. Willa had, the previous summer, for the first time visited the beautiful island of Grand Manan, P.Q. where she was to build a cottage; and had stopped with the Hambourgs on Saint Vincent Street in Toronto on the way.

She was warm and kind about four

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Magazine, The Journal of a Mud House. But more sceptical about the time and fire I spent in fighting the Pueblos' battles against Sentaors Fall and Bursum, who tried to capture their lands; and against the Indian Commissioner who wanted to suppress their rituals. Why not, she urged, instead write a novel.

Willa was thinking a great deal, at this time, of the novel as a literary form; in spite of her negations of the opinions of The New Republic, I noticed that she did not scorn it as an organ for her own ideas. The Novel Demeuble appeared there on April 12th, 1922. One of her most provocative and artfullly condensed critical essays - later reprinted in Not Under Forty and the posthumous Willa Cather on Writing - it pleads as did her Borzei Essay, for the novel as imaginative art, divested of journalism, free of literal material descriptions except as emotional penumbra - as in Tolstoi - to the characters themselves.

In these eight pages of print she deals succinctly with Balzac, Tolstói, D. H. Lawrence, Merimee and Hawthorne. And writes several passages as good as the following:

> "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the thing or the deed, that give high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself."

This important essay seemed to justify the method used in both *O Pioneers* and *My Antonia*; it stirred up plenty

-172-

But it was plotted and thin and, by comparison, timid in
dealing with the so called "problem of evil." Miss Cather
here, no longer sees things in a sunny glow but in a hot-
cold way with a sweet-sour sauce, like the French novelists
she admired. The heroine who does not preserve the moralities,
does preserve the amenities, and sometimes surprises us with
the nobilities.

Willa was more ready to let the newspapers in on the
secrets of her new heroine than was customary with her. She
told a New York World columnist (?) that Mrs. Forrester had been
created out of an emotion that reacts on a true artist like
food on a hungry person. She had been "teased" (Sarah Orne
Jewett's word again) for years!

"A Lost Lady was a beautiful ghost in my mind for
twenty years before it came together as a possible subject
for presentation. All the lovely emotions that one has had,
some day appear with bodies and it isn't as if one found
ideas suddenly. Before this, the memories of these experiences
and emotions have been like a perfume."...

"To me, the one important thing is never to kill the
figure that you care for, for the sake of atmosphere, all-
balanced structure, or neat presentation. Sometimes too much
symmetry kills things.

By this time I knew that Antonia was a "real person", still
living and visited by the author when she went West. Mrs.
Forrester was dead and gone, but she, too, I learned from
Willa, had been a challenging "real" figure of my friend's
childhood and adolescence. One of her chamrs to the selected
youngsters who picknicked in the grove, or were invited to
share meals with the Forresters, had been that the lost lady
lived in another world, was visited by distinguished strangers
from afar,--lived outside town, across a bridge that often