There are holes in my education I tell you. Gaping holes. Black holes. Vortexes of ignorance that need to be carefully skirted lest the gilded facade of my erudition be ripped away, my four years of ivy-walled finishing school be called to account, and my empty head be laid bare.
American authors of a certain era are one such example. I’m talking here roughly (roughly!) about the first half of the 20th century, somewhere between Maggie: Girl of the Streets and To Kill a Mockingbird. How ’bout them bookends?
Goofy as heck. But in my student-mind, there was this woolly and wild No Man’s Land stretching between two trenches of American Lit, between the barbed-wire redoubts of then and now. There’s what I’ll call New World Canonical – the Hawthornes and Melvilles and Twains that found permanent place in the preternaturally mildewed pages of our high school readers. And then there were those post-war explorers — Salingers and such — writers edgy enough to provide extracurricular, if adolescent, enjoyment. (Oh, those slow-clock days, when summer sand and falling leaves would corrupt the pages of my paperbacks!)
Of course, the names and the titles are familiar, and in review, I’ve read more than a few. But they all seemed to either point forward or back, to one side or another. Did they ride horses? Old! Drive cars? New! Some things got lost in this matrix, fell right through the gaps. Some things like Steinbeck, to pick a sinful omission I corrected only recently.
No one’s to blame for skipping over or mis-shelving many great works but me. So when it was my turn to pick a book for Book Club I thought it time to shovel a little knowledge down that particular pit, dump a little data into my ignorant brain-holes. But who? Which of the great unread? Eudora Welty? Flannery O’Conner? William Faulker? How about Willa Cather?
Sure, Willa Cather it is!
(Not so much a choice as a hunch, Cather proved to lie at another weird convergence of my space-time meridians. Something in the fates is pulling me to the land south and west of Omaha, where Cather was raised. This is something I’ll get into later, but for now I’ll say that this choice was coincidentally confirmed at my wife’s academic conference this year, hosted at the University of Nebraska. The keynote speaker spoke on Cather, and spoke well, and spoke well of her.)
I ended up reading two of her novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Ántonia. Enjoyed them both, will be reading more.
But where do they fit in? Are they old or new? Do they cut today’s mustard, or are they leftovers from fiction’s past? I’m not entirely sure. She’s short on plot, she depicts, she describes, hangs words in the moment. But there’s also not much in the way of sub-text. There’s no obvious cause to champion, no axe to grind, wrongs to right, nor pathos to purge. The naughty bits of life are present and accounted for, duly noted. Yet the writing, though never delicate, remains chaste.
It might be something about the subject matter too. Prairie-settling life seems older than it should. The stuff they had was meager, hard worn, scratched and patched, belying relatively recent dates of manufacture. The pioneers were time travelers, willfully going back centuries, dung-burning in cave-like dug-outs, gambling years of hardship for a potential payoff.
Such is the true trouble with building a timeline on hunches and feels. Like William Gibson says, the future is here… just not evenly distributed. While the Great Gatsby was toodling around West Egg, Cather’s kin were still breaking virgin sod, pushing out native grass for market-ready crops, mapping the grid lines familiar to any bicoastal flyer.
Anyway, it was good to spend some time with Cather. To take each tale for what it is, to treat each character as a fine friend of the times, a tour-guide to the transitions that rolled fast like thunder up and over the once wide-open spaces, the prairies, the plains, and the desserts that still hold mysteries.
Fine writing, Willa. Pleasant reading. Well-informed.
