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."
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."
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