What’s in Cather’s Letters

This month, two Willa Cather experts, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, are publishing the seven-hundred-page “Selected Letters of Willa Cather.” For Cather scholars, or even just fans, this is a big event, because access to Cather’s correspondence has not been easy. She burned quite a few of her letters, and in her will she forbade publication of any that remained. Scholars could examine many of the letters, often just by going or writing to the libraries in which they were housed, but they had to sign an agreement promising not to quote them. The trust that Cather set up in her will to enforce that ban and other matters expired when her nephew died, in 2011. Hence this book.

Presumably, she issued the no-quotes rule in order to protect to herself—her privacy, her reputation. Little did she know. With the arrival of the highly political literary theories of the late seventies onward—deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, the new historicism, the far reaches of feminism—her novels were subjected to intense scrutiny. She was called defensive, racist, sexist, male-identified, and many other bad things. Above all, she was accused of being an undeclared lesbian. But her letters could not be quoted in proof or disproof of these claims, and of course this prohibition made her seem all the more suspect. What was she trying to hide?

The lesbian business was widely considered the root of the other betrayals, and so a special effort was made to establish her homosexuality. It was known that when Cather was at the University of Nebraska, she had a crush on another student, Louise Pound, a distinguished young woman who would later become the first female president of the Modern Language Association. In those days, “girl crushes” were accepted as something normal in college women (see Lillian Faderman’s book “Surpassing the Love of Men”). Knowing this, a recent biographer of Cather—Sharon O’Brien, an English professor at Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania—said that in deciding the question of whether Cather was a lesbian, she would hold herself to a very strict, general definition of that term. Not only would the woman in question have to be shown to be very attached to another woman—she would have to identify the attachment as homosexual. Then O’Brien pointed to what she considered the definitive evidence regarding Cather: a letter from Cather to Pound, from June 15, 1892. Because of the novelist’s ban on any reproduction of her correspondence, O’Brien could not quote the letter verbatim, so she reworded it. In O’Brien’s paraphrase, Cather wrote to Pound that “it was so unfair that feminine friendship should be unnatural, but she agreed with Miss De Pue [a classmate] that it was.” So there you had it, the smoking gun. Cather saw her affection for Pound as unnatural; she felt there was something wrong with her. For years after O’Brien wrote this, in a 1984 article, and then repeated it in her 1987 biography, “Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice,” a large number of Cather scholars, especially the younger ones, accepted that O’Brien had provided the proof of Cather’s homosexuality.

I became interested in Cather in the early nineties. When I read O’Brien’s article, I was curious, and I ordered a photocopy of the letter in question from its owner, the Duke University Library. When I read it, I discovered that O’Brien’s paraphrase was exactly the opposite of what Cather had said. But, like O’Brien, I had signed that no-quoting agreement, and so when I came to write about this, I, too, had to reword Cather’s sentence. I said, in the tightest possible paraphrase, that what Cather had written to Pound was: “It is clearly unjust that female friendship should be unnatural, I concur with Miss De Pue that far.” It seemed very interesting—even fun—to me that a widespread and important assumption about Cather was based on a complete misrepresentation of her words. Still, my point couldn’t be completely convincing, because it didn’t carry the weight of Cather’s own words. Now, thanks to Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout’s book, we can read the words that Cather wrote to Pound: “It is manifestly unfair that ‘feminine friendships’ should be unnatural, I agree with Miss De Pue that far.” When I see how close this is to what I called my paraphrase, I think I should have just used Cather’s words without the quote marks. A veteran Cather scholar told me that she and many of her colleagues did that all the time, and nobody ever called them on it.

I don’t believe that O’Brien deliberately lied (though she may have had a “cognitive bias”). Nor do I think that Cather was not homosexual. I assume that she was, in her feelings if not in her actions. (She may have died a virgin.) I base this not just on her life but also on her fiction, which very rarely represents a heterosexual relationship that has any romantic or sexual glow to it. Actually, a number of Cather’s women are seduced, attacked, or otherwise misused by men. As for happy heterosexual couples, they seem to be friends rather than anything more (this is the case with what I think are Cather’s two most beloved heroines, Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda), and / or they are old. Perhaps the happiest couple in Cather’s novels are the heroes of “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Latour and Vaillant. But they are both men: Catholic priests. Cather gives no indication that there is any sex going on there.

The truly damaging thing about the debate over Cather’s sexual orientation was not the matter of lesbianism, however. Most of the Cather scholars I have talked to about this have told me that, long before O’Brien produced her putative proof in 1984, they had figured that Cather was homosexual. Furthermore, at that time, the gay rights movement had been going on for over a decade. To say that a person who lived in the early part of the century was an undeclared homosexual was not a big deal.

No, the problem was that once she was tagged as a closet lesbian, it was assumed that she lived her life in fear and unhappiness. At that time, proponents of the new modes of literary analysis already believed that the very center of art—its motor, almost—was conflict, but that the conflict was hidden. You had to ferret it out, and for years critics had been doing so, with artist after artist. But Cather was a special treat, because she was an intimidating, conservative woman. To have her in the dock was like getting to interrogate J. Edgar Hoover. The critics went to work, with joy.

There are many, many examples of the resulting folly. At the cost of seeming to recommend a book of mine, let me recommend a book of mine, “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism” (2000), which gives a generous sampling of these deep readings. I will cite only my special favorite, in the words I used in the book:

In a 1989 essay Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pioneer of “queer theory,” writes that “The Professor’s House” might seem, on the surface, “hererosexist,” but that its underlying rebellion against heterosexism can be discovered by deconstructing the last sentence of the book—specifically, one word in that sentence, “Berengaria,” the name of the ship on which the professor’s wife and daughter are sailing home for Europe. Here is Sedwick’s analysis of that word:

“Berengaria, ship of women: the {green} {aria}, the {eager}{brain}, the {bearing} and the {bairn}, the {raring}{engine}, the {bargain} {binge}, the {ban} and {bar}, the {garbage}, the {barrage} of {anger}, the {bare} {grin}, the {rage} to {err}, the {rare} {grab} for {being}, the {begin} and {rebegin} {again}.”

This list of anagrams, which must have taken a while to work out, supposedly reveals the maelstrom of lesbian energies churning beneath the surface of “The Professor’s House,” energies that Cather was venting when she gave the ship that strange name. Yes, Sedgwick says, the name has a historical meaning—Berengaria was the wife of Richard the Lion-Hearted—but otherwise it is a “nonsense word.” She apparently does not know that it was the name of a real ship, a famous Cunard ocean liner, on which Cather had returned from Europe immediately before starting work on “The Professor’s House”

It’s funny, but it’s also a scandal. This hard-working writer, who hailed from a dusty little town in Nebraska, who at the beginning had no credentials, no money, no influential friends, and who—forget the rest—was of the wrong sex (in the twenties and thirties, American literature’s top echelons were largely reserved for men): this woman, because she was supposedly a lesbian and because, therefore, all her work was considered encoded, full of secrets, was made the sport of literary theorists. And while they were snuffling about in her presumed recesses, all the great things about her—her profundity, her stern tragic sense, her grand, unshowy musical prose (she may have had a better ear than any other American novelist)—all these were ignored.

And so I am grateful to Jewell and Stout for giving us the actual record. Like so many other collections of letters, this one involves a great deal of non-earth-shaking material. Dear mother, she writes, The napkins you sent are so nice. Dear mother, I’m so sorry you have a cold. Still, as in other collections of letters, these ordinary matters silt up to create a personality in a way that biography never can. As for explaining how Cather became a great artist, the letters don’t, but there’s nothing that accounts for that, in Cather or any artist.

Photograph, of Willa Cather, by Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress.