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."

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.

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.