The Hopkins Review

Willa Cather gives us memorable characters and grand descriptions of the Nebraska prairies and the Southwest—vivid landscapes and the women and men residing in and travelling through them. We tend to think of Cather in this body of work as a writer of pastoral, in, for example, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), and in parts of One of Ours (1922); as a chronicler of western settlement and frontier life in these novels and in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927); and as a celebrant of artists and visionaries, above all the opera singer Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (1915) but also the engineer and bridge-builder Bartley Alexander in Alexander’s Bridge (1912) and the adventurer and inventor Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1925). Knowing as we do from biographers that the primary loves of Cather’s life were women, we also may conceive of her as a gay writer whose same-sex friendships and heterosexual relationships in her fiction (“Paul’s Case,” for instance, 1905) intimate interests and affections that Cather could not, or would not, declare openly and that a century later we perceive, interpreting between the lines.

All of this defines Cather, yet it limits her as well and keeps us from seeing and valuing her as one of America’s most eloquent tragic writers. She is a deep, discerning creator of tragic art, with a mastery of nuance and implication. Cather evokes and hints at much more than she says directly: and we lose a great deal, her beat and rhythm of meaning, if we move quickly across her pages. Cather is not what she [End Page 537] seems. What she is, is a tragic artist, absorbed in the fact of pain and in the task and trial of living with it.

Sometimes Cather is affirmative and exuberant, as when she pays tribute to Thea Kronborg’s vocal power and tenacity and zeal for art. But more often she is somber and melancholy, elegiac and regretful, about the fate both of the work we do and the love we seek. Cather believes that life is an interim between blank spaces, and that we must fill it with labor and recreation, making something of ourselves, prepared for death. She shares the perception that Hamlet voices at the moment of his death, “the rest is silence”—words that are at once soothing and terrifying, reassuring and fearful. This was one of Cather’s favorite lines, elementary and unadorned, in all of Shakespeare, the depth and range of which no explanation or exegesis could capture. “The higher processes of art,” Cather maintains, “are all processes of simplification.” In praise of Katherine Mansfield she says—describing herself—that this writer “communicates vastly more than she actually writes.” Like Ernest Hemingway at his best in the 1920s, Cather demonstrates that on the page less is frequently more. She crafts simple sentences that exceed paraphrase and mean momentously.

This deep simplicity is the fundamental quality of many of the finest passages in Homer, the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare (I stumbled when I saw; she should have died hereafter; what you know, you know), and Chekhov, and in Cather, Hemingway, and Robert Frost. Tragic art dramatizes the core human truth that while everything matters, nothing matters, not ultimately. More than that: though nothing ultimately matters, everything that we do matters and we must do it. “What was any art,” writes Cather in The Song of the Lark, “but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”

Cather and Hemingway thus are for me the preeminent American tragic writers of fiction, supreme stylists of sorrow, lovers of life, [End Page 538] authorities on pain, melodists of loneliness and diminution, exceptional performers of the blues who know, as Hemingway said, “that all stories, if continued far enough, end in death.” Cather is in the tragic mode in all of her work, but the bluest...