Betty Jean Steinshouer Books
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Letters to Bolivar
  • Long Road from Red Cloud

The Whole Cather

5/15/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
  Looking back on 30 years of portraying Willa Cather on the Chautauqua circuit, I tried to let her be herself, as shown through years and years of research. UNL Professor Sue Rosowski once told me she had figured out that I approached Cather from the inside out, while most "academics" approached her from the outside in. That was a big responsibility.

Sometimes I was tempted to make Cather be more temperate in her less-than-feminist statements about women's suffrage or certain female novelists. Other times I wished she could be more forthcoming about her marriage-less state. Now that her long-verboten letters are easily searched, I understand that she was an even more complex person than she seemed at the time. Her flip answers to the question of why she never married (one favorite was to quote Louisa May Alcott: "I'd rather paddle my own canoe") and her seemingly misogynist statements about the suitability of women for authorship and/or full citizenship, taken in the context of her early confusion about gender,  can lend itself to lively debates about who she really was and what she really thought. 

As she famously wrote of Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark, "There's no sag in me."  Thea knew who she was, presumably, from day one. She didn't fit the mold of a marriageable young female any more than Cather did. Thea's own father knew she was "not the marrying kind . . . too peppery and too fond of having her own way."

Fred Ottenberg, the man in the book who comes closest to winning Thea's hand, is also realistic about her, recognizing that she's "distinctly not the marrying kind .  . . equipped to be an artist, and to be nothing else; already directed, concentrated, formed as to mental habit," and that "Marriage would be an incident, and not an end with her."

Fred was right about that. As Thea expressed it, "Who marries who is a small matter, after all." How could Willa Cather have created such a woman, in fiction, if she did not herself have a wholly original view of marriage? For Cather, traditional marriage was an impossibility. This she knew, from an early age. But just as Thea did, she liked the thought of having "somebody human to make a report to once in a while."

She greatly minded not being able to have children, and doted on her nieces and nephews and the Menuhin cherubs - Yehudi and his sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah - as if they were her own. But Cather's parenting instincts were as much fatherly as motherly. She seemed a perfect balance of feminine and masculine, once she understood who it was she had to be. She could enjoy the silk stockings her brother sent as a Christmas present, even as she knew she lacked the physical requirements to be a "real" female. Like Thea, she knew "we don't get fairy tales in this world," and so she set out to be her most well-balanced, androgynous self.

Maslow called it self-actualization. I call it being whole.

0 Comments

No, Willa Cather was not transgender

4/30/2020

1 Comment

 
I try to make this distinction clear in Long Road from Red Cloud: Life Lessons from Willa Cather. After forty years of studying Cather, I came to the conclusion that she was born intersex. This meant that she had no choice when it came to her gender identity; that decision was made for her at birth. The main difference between transgender and intersex people lies in the issue of “bodily autonomy.” Some of the same surgeries most often sought by (and sometimes denied to) transgender individuals are forced on intersex babies and children, mainly to fit a doctor's pre-conceived notion of how they should look. These early surgeries often make necessary more and more intricate medical treatment as a result of the hormonal and reconstructive alterations that have been done to their bodies.  Some intersex people end up not having language for their body parts, accounting for Willa Cather’s fear that her organs would never measure up, if she were to “undergo a searching physical examination.”

I believe a Civil War doctor named William S. Love surgically altered the firstborn infant of Virginia and Charles Cather, the baby who had first been called “Willie,” in honor of men named William on both sides of the family. This fact might have been completely obscured by fear and secrecy in the family, especially after the child grew up and became a famous author, but for the courage of a woman named Mildred Bennett, who chose to write the truth, as close as she could get to it, in her landmark biography, The World of Willa Cather, published in 1951.

Bennett, as well as every other Cather biographer for the first forty years after Cather’s death in 1947, was consigned to writing about her subject in stilted terms, certainly never broaching the subject of gender identity, and only gradually coming to terms with what appeared to be Cather’s sexual orientation, as a “woman-loving woman,” in the language of my generation. Mildred Bennett never allowed herself, during the entire decade of our friendship, to say what people in Red Cloud, Nebraska, called Cather. 

Spelled phonetically, the word was first presented to me as “morpheedite.” I mulled it over for decades after Mildred’s death in 1989, until Willa Cather’s letters began to be published in 2013.

By 2018, I had followed enough tendrils that I could begin to weave the tapestry of Cather’s life in a new pattern. I drew on the lives of transgender people as well as intersex individuals in doing my research, because I found it fascinating to study how gender identity can fluctuate, over a lifetime. This was certainly true of Willa Cather, and it fully informed the “lessons” she learned in life, valuable ways of being that I hope will be a comfort to current and future generations of “women-loving women,” as well as intersex and transgender people whose identity may be more challenging to define. For example, I came to believe that Cather was not what I called in the book “a garden-variety lesbian,” but that her identity was more complex than that. Certainly, she loved women, but because in her early life, up to and through puberty, she identified mostly as male, her response to feminine beauty has puzzled her readers and critics for decades.

To read novels such as My Antonia and short stories from “Tommy, the Unsentimental” to “The Old Beauty,” is to begin your own journey with Willa Cather and the fascinating ways in which her experiments in gender identification and sexual orientation played out in her work. It must have been painfully confusing at times, to be “Willie” and then “Wilella,” (a name her mother realized would never stick, by the time her child was fourteen months old, probably as a result of the surgery Dr. Love had performed). Virginia Cather changed it immediately to “Willa” The self-assigned name became fully “William” during college, but after being embarrassed by bullying on the University of Nebraska campus, Cather went back to the familiar, signing her letters “Willie” and preferring to be called that early name all the rest of her life by those who knew her best.

She may have settled into “Willa” as her pseudonym, more or less, after identifying strongly with the great “Georges” of literature, especially George Sand, whose image she kept over her mantle throughout her life. Clearly, she had been defined and designed as a girl, by Dr. Love, and by each succeeding doctor in her life (she and her mother were exceedingly close to Dr. Love in Virginia and to Dr. McKeeby in Red Cloud) and by the medical teams who worked on her “condition” at the Mayo Clinic. Her letters show at least two extended visits to the famous research facility in Rochester, Minnesota, one sometime in 1912-15, and the other in 1928.

Even those who travel widely can usually wait until they return home to consult their doctor, barring an emergency en route. Willa Cather was dependent on doctors wherever she went, with frequent mysterious maladies requiring emergency treatment and often hospitalization. She may or may not have been told by her parents what her specific physical makeup had been, at birth. Even her parents may not have known, fully, all the secrets the doctors knew.  The first real evidence I have found that Cather was aware of her body’s exigencies was when she told her brother Roscoe how much she appreciated that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic had spared her having to have more surgery in 1928. They called her condition a “hardened appendix,” which more than one doctor has verified was a euphemistic term for an undescended testicle. for which surgery is often done, in modern times, when a child is between six months and two years old. Dr. Love's surgeries must have had more to do with Cather's outer appearance, since she lived nearly all her life with that "hardened appendix," finally having major surgery in 1942 to remove it.

Recent history in which the term “hermaphrodite” has been replaced by the less alarming “intersex” contains stories of the lies told to parents in order to justify the genital mutilation of their intersex children.  Those who read my book about Willa Cather’s “long road from Red Cloud” may benefit from watching a documentary on Amazon Prime from New Zealand, called “InterseXion,” and a more recent, shorter film called “A Normal Girl” now streaming (until May 31). Register by clicking this link: Women Make Movies Virtual Film Festival.

“A Normal Girl” is about Pidgeon Pagonis, who became an intersex activist advocating for “bodily autonomy” after discovering in college the truth of their own genital mutilation, in which their parents had lied to them because the doctors lied to the parents about what was about to happen to their child's body. Pidgeon’s story is partially told in Long Road from Red Cloud, but watch both films if you want, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.” If you sign up and watch “A Normal Girl” now, it also contains a Q & A, in which Pidgeon reveals information about many more surgeries than were revealed in “InterseXion,” when they gave the impression that there had only been one, at age 12. As they gained access to medical files, they learned how early the surgeries had begun. Their story helps to illuminate what may have true of Cather's surgeries, as well.

Since Willa Cather was born in 1873, we won’t likely ever know the rest of her story, but by learning about other intersex people, starting with Pidgeon, whose body was altered at ages 6 months, 1, 4, and 11, we can understand more fully the miracle of who  Cather was and who she became. “Gender as performance” is a topic we can tackle here, perhaps as part of a podcast I’m hoping to do for my new Virtual Chautauqua series. Please post here or email me if you’d be interested in being a part of that discussion.


1 Comment

Boston Marriages & Scribbling Women

3/26/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
It felt good to be back in the saddle again, sort of. I found myself being very careful about the arrangements for my big weekend of museum programs, March 7-8. Not knowing for sure how long (or if) I'd be able to stand and hold forth, I asked for a podium (my standard favorite on the old Chautauqua stage, to distinguish my authors from other characters who cavorted about), and a low stool. That way I knew I'll have something to lean on or perch on, if my energy flagged or pain caught up with me. Perhaps the excitement of being out doing things again would carry me through. I should have known that it would be the audiences that carried me, in Gainesville and then St. Augustine, two of my best beloved locales in Florida, places I've done decades of research, in the former, and lived a decade of pure delight, in the latter.  As Lily Tomlin expressed in "Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," the goosebumps come from what happens in the audience, not on the stage.

From the sheer amount of tears shed, you might have suspected I knew that it would be our last time in a long time to gather in groups together - to hug, and pat, and just generally treasure one another. Another few days more, all hell would break loose, and we would be gone from each other, with barely a wave goodbye.


There was an innocence to those gatherings, sixty minutes of "Boston Marriages Gone South" seen through the shared lives of Alice James and Katharine Peabody Loring, of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, of Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane, of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Carolyn Percy Cole. I had almost as much fun as in olden days of costumed performances. Yes, the new pain from metastasized bone tumors in my feet and legs  was almost unbearable at times. By the time we got to St. Augustine the second day, I could neither stand nor lean on anything. I ended up sitting with my back to the audience, all of us fully immersed in the chock-full PowerPoint of "Scribbling Women in Florida" before us, a full ninety minutes of deep literary history - a dozen women who "got sand in their shoes," Orange Blossom Special-style, and were never again the same, after their time in the Land of Flowers.

Sitting across from and beside old friends and new, at dinner and at breakfast the next morning, none of us could have imagined how altered our lives would be in a week, two weeks.  I had great discoveries to share - the juxtaposition of two of my scribbling women with the presidents of their era: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson and John F. Kennedy. All of them so soon dead, after changing the course of history together.

And now it is our turn, it seems, to change the outcome of our shared time, or not. Sad that we don't have a leader of anywhere near the caliber of those who met the dire challenge of slavery or the Bay of Pigs. The poets, the musicians,  the beautiful doctors and nurses and scientists, all of us, will have to rise to the occasion to save ourselves, and each other.

"Virtual Chautauqua" is on the fast track, now, being the only gift I can give to the world in the near future. I burn the night oil again, hoping to have "Scribbling Women in Florida" adapted to a new format, ready for online delivery to students in the Panhandle next week, those who  study in the wee hours, between jobs and childcare, to become nurses, paramedics, law enforcement, truck drivers. They, too, will save us from ourselves, from those who cannot lead us out of this.  It will be the hourly workers, the ones who exhaust themselves in caring for others, who will be our legacy. We must stay out of their way and bang the drum to the beat of our human hearts, until we meet again.

I feel no longer the pain that accompanies this journey. Only the joy.





0 Comments

Getting my act together . . .

3/3/2020

1 Comment

 
Preparing for a whole new mode of presentation:  the PowerPoint lecture. I must leave my hats and costumes behind now and focus on staying upright for the duration. This is not easy with bone metastases in my feet and legs. Thank heavens I have a driver to get me to Gainesville and St. Augustine for museum appearances next weekend. This is one of the programs on deck.
Picture
1 Comment

Willa Cather's Immortality

2/8/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
The death of James Joyce’s only grandson has revealed the contempt with which the Joyce family viewed scholars, critics, and would-be biographers. The New York Times story about Stephen Joyce quotes his famous grandfather saying of such novels as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that he had been determined to “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

Having just published my 40-year contemplation on Willa Cather’s “enigmas and puzzles,” I can say with confidence that her own mysterious ways with future biographers in mind did not reflect a contempt for scholarship or a desire to insure her own notoriety. Joyce’s family had good reasons for wanting to keep his correspondence from being widely read. His letters are filthy. Cather’s are not.

Indeed, Willa Cather did not have a vulgar bone in her body. She hoped for "decorum" as part of her afterlife, thus the man she chose to write her “authorized” biography was E.K. Brown, English professor at the University of Chicago, a most decorous Canadian who had come to her attention after writing a scholarly homage in celebration of her 70th birthday for the Yale Review. Her feeling that Professor Brown understood her literary legacy did not mean that she wanted her executor and lifelong partner, Edith Lewis, to give him carte blanche when it came to delving into what she might have meant when she referred to "the thing not named."

Though she did once state the opinion that it always takes at least a century after an author’s death for their legacy, if any, to be fully known, Cather’s reluctance to have her letters published or quoted was not a shell game she was playing (although Edith Lewis, perhaps unwittingly, turned it into that). I have come to believe that Willa Cather had a sincere wish to protect her remaining siblings as well as her nieces and nephews from having questions posed to them that she knew they could not answer. These were not questions about her personal life but about her biological and medical realities. Most questions about what had happened to her at birth or during her early years she would have been hard-pressed to answer herself, since so much of her medical history was likely hidden in silence or confusion. 

Long Road from Red Cloud: Life Lessons from Willa Cather explores untold reasons for the secrecy that surrounded Willa Cather. Of two early researchers, Mildred Bennett and Bernice Slote, who studied her extensively enough to grasp the magnitude of her story, only Bennett tried to (gingerly) publish what she knew in a book. Slote shared her astute analysis of Willa Cather in the occasional paper read at a conference, or in editorial comments and introductions to collections of Cather’s work,  although she had hoped to write a full biography, since Bennett’s covered only Cather’s childhood, and E.K. Brown died before he could finish his.

A great many other books have been written about Willa Cather in the meantime, but the “definitive” biography has yet to be done. If Doris Grumbach had been allowed to complete hers, a more realistic view of Cather might have emerged, much sooner. But by then Edith Lewis had died, in 1972 (and Bernice Slote, in 1983), and a general panic had taken hold that Cather might be “outed” if Grumbach were allowed to write a full biography. It had, after all, been Willa Cather's only option in life, to live as what appeared to be a "garden variety lesbian," although the full story of her identity is much more complicated than that.

As it turned out, Grumbach herself was “outed” as  a lesbian in Cather circles, and her hope of finishing the project faded quickly. She told me in 1986 that she had given up trying to “crack the code” in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s home town, although Grumbach understood the necessity of Cather’s own coded language, living as a pseudo-closeted lesbian in Greenwich Village during the era of Comstock Laws that impounded Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness the minute it arrived in New York Harbor. The reality of Cather’s life was much grimmer than most literary scholars would grasp for generations to come, owing to the narrowness of most academic research, and to Cather’s own determination that any lasting fame must be from her worth as an author, not as the "morpheedite" that her home town seemed determined to reveal her to be.

I was barely out of graduate school in 1979 when I made the first of a decade-long series of research trips to Nebraska and Mildred Bennett decided she could trust me with details she had discovered in her research but could not publish. Mildred and I could talk about the "Pound Letters" that revealed Cather's first love affair with a woman, but we never talked about the deeper secret in Cather's life, although Mildred made sure I would hear about it from a trusted relative of a Cather childhood friend. A great deal of medical and gender-related research was required, on my part, before I could approach the possibility that the local lore might be true. It is a subject still verboten in Cather Studies and in Red Cloud. Although the now-accepted term "intersex" is perfectly respectable, the most frequent Google search since my book launched two months ago is “Willa Cather as hermaphrodite.”

So we still have a way to go before the “ghosts” Mildred Bennett discovered in Willa Cather’s psyche can be put to rest. As Cather once said, with ironic humor, “It is well that the dead sleep soundly.” She knew, as she made her journeys to the Mayo Clinic, seeking out the mysteries hidden in her body, she would someday have to make peace with her own "intimations of immortality.
"

1 Comment

Holding on to dear life . . .

2/4/2020

2 Comments

 

I finally understand what it means to hold on for dear life - to the dearness of life. I am very groggy from the protocol I'm on  and not very able to express myself right now, but I am holding on, and hopeful, quoting Emily Dickinson a lot. As in "Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul/and sings the tune without the words/and never stops at all."
I've had some wonderful feedback on Long Road from Red Cloud from another major Cather scholar. It could lead to very good things. A great project is also underway to finally publish as much as can be gleaned of Volume II of Mildred Bennett's autobiography. If you've read my book and/or ever been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, you know who Mildred is.
Mostly sleeping, now, but back soon.



2 Comments

another book I wish I'd written

1/8/2020

2 Comments

 

A Willa Cather scholar of some renown told me recently, "Yours is a book I wish I'd had the courage to write. But only you could have written it." 

This is true of any book we pour ourselves into. Authenticity depends upon years of research and analysis, still more research, and live interviews when we can get them. I am lucky to have started my Cather research in the late 1970s, when some of her relatives and close friends were still alive and somewhat willing to talk. 


My own category of "Books I Wish I'd Written" has always been eclectic. I have former President Barack Obama to thank for the most recent addition: Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. Although Obama didn't say he ranked them in any order, it turned up third on his Favorite Books of 2019. 

Watching the video of Casey Cep's reading at Politics and Prose soon after her first book started to hit the bestseller lists, I was first struck by how young she is, to have done four years of research on a book only tangentially about Harper Lee, but absolutely about Alabama, and to have grasped, from the get-go, that it was all about Alabama, just as my big book (which I hope to finish in 2020) must be all about Florida.

Selection of material is crucial when you've got a story to tell. It's the historic details Casey Cep chose that make her book shine. For example, she tells us that Harper Lee inscribed a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird for First Lady Roslyn Carter in 1978 by quoting a verse from one of the Hymns to Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace." 

I was destined to fall in love with Furious Hours, not only because Obama loved it, but because it mentions three of my favorite southern women: Harper Lee, Roslyn Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally back at work on my 20-year project, examining the Florida Journeys of twelve women authors, I am soaking up every new detail published about Hurston, and there have been a lot, in recent years.

Despite her claims about being born in the all-black town of  Eatonville, most Zora Neale Hurston fans know by now that she was born in Alabama, not Florida. That's why I can include her in a book about women transported to the Sunshine State, most in adulthood, but three as children. Hurston fits that category, along with Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rose Wilder Lane. 

As Casey Cep shows, Zora Neale Hurston had Alabama in her bones, although her family moved to Eatonville when Zora was too young to remember much about her actual birthplace of Notasulga. But she knew instinctively, if she wanted to learn anything about voodoo without going all the way to Haiti, she had to go back to Alabama. 


Cep's book is ostensibly about a voodoo preacher named Willie Maxwell, who created mayhem for many, and the brave man who shot him. It was the murder trial that brought Harper Lee to Alexander City, Alabama, researching what she thought would be her next book, perhaps her last book.
Casey Cep tells the story as well as any good novelist would do, except it's not fiction. Thus the reason for my admiration, bordering on envy, for the way she brings it all to life. 

Not all of my "Books I Wish I'd Written" fall into this category. One of the very first to inhabit the list, more than forty years ago, was a little red book called When Found, Make A Verse Of  by Helen Bevington.

I had no idea back in pre-internet days who Helen Bevington was, and I sill don't. It has never occurred to me to Google her until now. Her little red book has stayed on my list, regardless, but it turns out she wrote other books considered more important than my favorite. One of her novels was even short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. That same book, Charley Smith's Girl, was banned by the library in Bevington's hometown of Worcester, New York, because it told the story of a Methodist minister's wife divorcing him for adultery, and Bevington happened to be that very minister's daughter.

I don't know if I'll get to read this marvelous writer's novel, or any of her other books. My time here grows short. But I do like knowing that she taught one of my other favorite writers, Reynolds Price, who credited her poetry class at Duke with teaching him "that poetry was the prime means by which the English language took to purify and communicate itself most eloquently."  I'd say her little red book did the same thing.

Perhaps every writer, when we're lucky, gets to write the one book they were meant to write in their lifetime. Willa Cather considered that book, out of her twelve novels, to be My Antonia.

I have some more books in me, but I may not get them finished. If I do or I don't, I think I shall always feel that the one book I was meant to write is the one my kind colleague said only I could have written:  Long Road from Red Cloud. Its Life Lessons from Willa Cather makes the closest to poetry of her situation that I could come.  There's an audio I recorded myself (with a how-to on audio books soon to come), an e-book, a paperback, and next a hardcover edition for libraries and collectors. We are compiling a list of independent bookstores throughout the U.S. which will be serving as brick-and-mortor distributors for this book and those to come. If my strength returns and I am able eventually to do a bit of a reading tour, they will be my first stops, along with a few of the hundreds of libraries and museums where I've done Chautauqua-style portrayals of wonderful women authors over the years. If you're a bookseller or a librarian who would like to get in on that, let us know.

2 Comments

resurfacing . . .

9/14/2019

0 Comments

 

This is the first time in 64 years that I've experienced a long illness. I try to go with it, to cooperate as much as possible, in order to be able to swim back to the surface eventually. 
Since May I've been at work on the audio edition of Long Road from Red Cloud. Many told me how important it would be for the story to be told in my own voice, because of what it says about Willa Cather, Cather biography in general, and the life and work of my old friend Mildred Bennett in particular. 
Most of the month of June was lost in a miasma of pain, but July and August were productive, and the recording and editing is well in hand. Now for the mysterious process known as "re-mastering." Sounds wonderfully butch, doesn't it? Like Willa Cather when she heard her first book of short stories had  been sent to Henry James for his assessment, I worry about falling short. My voice has been awfully uneven in the process - sometimes strong, especially when reading Cather's own words, or Sarah Orne Jewett's, or say, H.L. Mencken's - but too often weak or hoarse or just awfully ill. I fear it will never pass Audible's strict standards. 
But onward we go - thanks to everyone who has lent a hand, a shoulder, a chuckle, a tasty treat. You know who you are.  

0 Comments

to make a book . . .

4/20/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Has it really been six years since I let this old website go to pasture? Time to revive, so I'm told, to let people know that I'm still here, for a bit longer, and finally the books are starting to be birthed, one by one, or two by two, being the Gemini that I am. Just sorting out 40 years of research materials is mind-boggling enough. I really did make my first Cather trip to Nebraska in 1979, by train from DC to Hastings. Vi Borton met me at the station in the wee hours to take me on to Red Cloud. Last fall I did my final research pilgrimage to Cather country in the same way: first to Red Cloud, then circling back to Lincoln. What happened there is all in the book. I am as astonished as anyone. 
On March 30, 2018, the results of an ultrasound revealed that I had a mass growing in my lymph system that had already metastasized, so more tumors would follow. I decided because of the location(s) that I would not spend the rest of the spring and summer in and out of hospitals, trying to recover from the treatment itself. I had been working for many years on a book requested by the editors of University Press of Florida's History and Culture Series, but not being an academic with a regular paycheck, I had to pay the bills on the Chautauqua circuit for as long as I could. Now it was time to dip into my small reserves, finish as many manuscripts as possible, and get them out into the world. Many people have helped, in many ways. The Cather book is almost ready, teaching many lessons in its gestation process, making the way smoother for Florida Journeys. Feel free to chime in, join the the mailing list, or otherwise stay in touch. 

0 Comments

Willa Cather Unleashed . . . 

4/26/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
Well, it's finally happened. A few hundred of Willa Cather's carefully protected letters have been published - 566 out of over 3,000 that have been found so far. I just finished holding forth about them on Amazon, glad for Andy Jewell and Janis Stout that all their years of work have paid off, but also a bit sorry that so many of Cather's deepest sorrows will now be known to the world. She was such a private person, and I've tried over the years to only use segments of the letters, in performance, that enhance her public persona, not blur the personality traits she most valued. 

"No Sag."  That was Cather, and yet her private letters show her definitely wincing, if not sagging, at some of the things her siblings said and did, to each other as well as to her. At least the mystery is over, as to why she fought so hard to keep them unpublished. It isn't what so many thought - that she was squeamish about being "outed" as a lesbian.

Not at all. The letters show her fully herself, albeit painfully coming to terms with how she would be treated by her family as well as the families of the women she loved - Louise Pound's in Lincoln and Isabelle McClung's in Pittsburgh. When similar things were said and done to Gertrude Stein when she fell in love with May Bookstaver, one of her fellow medical school students at Johns Hopkins, Stein fled Baltimore for Paris and never returned to America until she was famous.

Not Cather.  She stayed put, but retreated into the closet except to her closest friends and perhaps a few trusted members of her family. Certainly, her nieces who spent parts of their summers on Grand Manan knew the importance of "Miss Lewis," Cather's partner of nearly 40 years. 


So many memories flood back, seeing these letters in print, most of which I've read over the years, from that first train journey in 1979 from DC to Hastings (and on to Red Cloud by car, since the train didn't stop there anymore, by then). Not all of my favorite letters made the edit, of course, including the best of the scandalous "Pound letters" Mildred Bennett furtively showed me before she died in 1989, after a decade of learning to trust my Cather instincts and where I was going with the whole Chautauqua thing. 

"I had to promise never to show these to anyone, in order to be able to write my book without getting sued, " Mildred said with a twinkle in her eye, shoving a manila envelope filled with the dangerous missives across our work table in the Red Cloud lumberyard, which she had purchased, hoping to make it into an international study center for Cather scholars.  Her book was published in 1951, just four years after Cather's death, the first "unauthorized" biography.

As Willa Cather once said, "It is good that the dead sleep soundly." So far the earth has not been disturbed around the Old Meeting House Burial Ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, where Miss Cather and Miss Lewis are interred.  One hopes that they would be smiling, just a little, could they know that the world has come home to the parish, now, and everyone knows how much they treasured one another, for all those years.







1 Comment
<<Previous
Forward>>
    Picture

    Archives

    May 2022
    April 2022
    May 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    September 2019
    April 2019
    April 2013
    March 2013
    October 2012
    May 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photo used under Creative Commons from Paul Lowry