Hijacked by Willa Cather: a quick re-read of A Lost Lady

NOTE: This post contains spoilers about the novel A Lost Lady

I’m incapable of turning down a good organized read these days. I’ve missed the group discussion dynamic, the “hive mind” of readers with varying degrees of expertise and experience. Discussing books together brings a lot more to the table. To be honest, it usually means I have to do less work. Let someone else think the thoughts and post them. I do my share, but I appreciate others who fill in the gaps. It’s a literary symbiotic relationship.

At the moment, I’m participating in two group reads: Willa Cather’s ‘A Lost Lady’ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The House in Paris.’ These are two very different writers, making them easier to juggle. Cather’s prose is direct and straight-forward, meaningful but not particularly dense. Bowen is a modernist, her style multi-layered, requiring greater depth of study. I can read Cather quickly once through, skimming key passages again if I need to, and feel confident I’ve understood her meaning. Elizabeth Bowen requires much more heavy lifting. I read her chapters sometimes two and three times and there’s still a lot of room for interpretation.

I enjoy them both because they are so different. I read Cather for deeply-rooted, early-20th Century American stories with a narrow focus on specific American regions – mostly the Great Plains and Southwest. She largely writes about the immigrant experience and the dramas of everyday life. Though most of her writing could be classified as somewhat plain – by which I mean without adornment, easily understood – she’s capable of moments of lyrical and poetic beauty, most especially when she writes about the natural world.

I also love Cather because she was a literary badass, gender-fluid before we knew the term, opinionated and ambitious. A writer of short stories and novels, book reviews and non-fiction pieces, Willa Cather was the editor of a major periodical – McClure’s Magazine – credited with originating muckraking journalism, investigative reporting that goes after criminal activity and deceptive practices amongst the wealthy and powerful. There’s so much more I want to know about her.

I’ve finished reading both books, though in the case of Bowen that means I’ve finished passing the words in front of my eyes to find out what happens; with the discussion ongoing, there’s still a long way to go in understanding the nuances. The part of me that loves literary scholarship thrives on writers like Elizabeth Bowen. I could just read her novels for their surface stories, but that’s just not me.

I love a good literary dig. The problem is it can be tiring, one reason my ears perked up when I saw a Twitter summer read poll conducted by the bookish podcast The Mookse and the Gripes, which A Lost Lady won. I’ve read the novel before – last year, over my Great Cather Vacation Adventure in Red Cloud, NE – but I’m an unashamed re-reader. This isn’t a proper, in-depth discussion, it’s more about posting a few thoughts and quotes on Twitter, in advance of the podcast recording sometime this week. They wanted to generate interest and encourage readers to pick up Cather. So far I don’t see a full discussion happening, but the podcast will cover it in more depth with the help of reader comments on Twitter.

A Lost Lady is one of the books set in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, NE. She changed the name of the place to Sweet Water, but there’s no real attempt at subterfuge. The married couple in the novel, Marian and Captain Forrester, are based on Red Cloud banking family Seward Garber and his wife, Marian Forrester is a young, beautiful woman married to a much older man. She is charming and well-loved, inspiring the adoration of every man in town – if not so much the women. She has an affair, but it’s not ruinous. It’s a thing understood to be true, a rumor no one can absolutely prove, but it’s a very small town. You can’t hide big secrets in small towns. Marian stays with her adoring husband, he says nothing about it, and their lives slide on comfortably until first they fall on hard financial times, and then he suffers a debilitating stroke. Without her solid husband to lean on, Marian’s standing in the community is less secure. From here on she’s living by her wits.

“He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter’s fire on the prairie, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story.

This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for a rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, – these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, – and this would always be his.”
– Willa Cather, A Lost Lady

Growing up in Red Cloud, Willa was canny enough to understand the stories told about Mrs. Garber, the bankers wife. To the surprise and dismay of her mother, to whom Cather confessed later, rumors got around and she knew every tale. The town tour I took in June 2021 covered the major players in Red Cloud and in Cather’s life. The place is miniscule. Everyone knew everyone else, which makes it very easy to know their business. I asked the tour guide how the residents took it when Cather used them as characters, if they were angry or confrontational. Quite the opposite, she said. Cather brought fame to Red Cloud, and fame brings tourists who still come to the town in search of the settings and characters from some of her most famous novels. Mrs. Garber must have cringed, but there were no defamation suits. Cather funnelled a lot of her money into Red Cloud, sponsoring buiding initiatives and donating generously. She wasn’t from there, having been born in Virginia, but this was where important formative years were spent. She saw through them and loved them anyway. Willa Cather was adopted as a hometown celebrity and admired for the rest of her life, though she never moved back.

As for contemporary readers of Cather’s novels, F Scott Fitzgerald was a huge fan. Taking a break from revising The Great Gatsby, he read A Lost Lady. The key issue here is – though he later contacted her to explain his side in case she thought he’d committed plagiarism – the Gatsby characters Daisy Buchanan and Nick Carraway closely resemble Marian Forrester and Niel Herbert from A Lost Lady. Once I read his letter to her and a piece about the stuation, I couldn’t un-see the similarities. When he wrote Cather, she replied she’d read his book and loved it. It never occurred to her he may have stolen her work. While I’ll admit I haven’t done my homework, I’m not sure I trust him as much as she did.

I will keep watching Twitter for tweets about A Lost Lady and participate accordingly, but it’s time to channel energy back into Elizabeth Bowen and the other books I’m reading, including a selection of the Booker Longlist 2022 titles. That’s a whole other subject, for another day.

2022, Chapter One: In which our heroine accepts a challenge!

10-01-22 / Lisa Guidarini

End of the story first: I just finished reading my second book of 2022, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. I’m not sure when a book last gave me actual chills – not hyperbolic chills but goosebumps, hair standing on end.

Holy hell.

This comes immediately on the heels of the book I finished the first week of January, a collection of short stories and nonfiction pieces by Shirley Jackson titled Let Me Tell You. In contrast to Didion, Jackson’s book was uneven. In contrast to Didion, I don’t see anything else measuring up until I’ve calmed down from the high of THAT NOVEL. But it’s unfair comparing a posthumous compilation of early and uncollected pieces the author may never have consented to publishing with a critically-acclaimed stunner of a novel that slaps you across the face, drags you up the road a piece, then leaves you for dead.

I should not have connected with Play It As It Lays. Set in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the Mojave Desert, if I were trying to come up with three places I’m less interested in it would take a minute. Fortunately, the book’s not about places. It’s a study of a woman living with the consequences of her choices in 1960s America. Maria Wyeth is an actress who plays the Hollywood game. She sleeps around, throws herself haphazardly into life, literally drives long distances for days with no direction. Already unstable, the inevitable choice to have an abortion upends her world, sending her spiralling. Without sympathy, unmoored, she cracks.

Didion (1934 – 2021) was an admirer of Hemingway, to put her style in context. She was a journalist-novelist: sparing and precise. While learning her craft, she copied out long passages of Hemingway’s writings. I’m not positive the student didn’t surpass the master.

Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965), of course, is known primarily as the author of the macabre short story “The Lottery,” as well as her two most popular novels: We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, the latter adapted into a Netflix series. Her themes are supernatural, modern American gothics. Her nonfiction can be charming and witty, as I learned from Let Me Tell You. Though some of the stories did let me down, the pieces compelled enough I pulled out the bio of Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin.

Both modern American writers, I haven’t put enough thought into their similarities to pull out the ways they mesh. I’m sure those exist but I didn’t juxtapose these two with an intention to dive in deeply. What brings them together is my list of 12 books I plan to read in 2022, books I’ve had on my shelves over a year and not yet read. Organized by Adam Burgess of the blog Roof Beam Reader, the specifics of the project are explained on his site.

There’s no conscious intent behind the books I chose, though interconnections are everywhere, no matter what you initially believe. As I read more by and about Jackson and Didion – which I’d like to do, having whetted my appetite with my first two reads of the year – I will find elements that resonate with the both of them. I’ve given up not assuming a universal law of attraction. Nothing supernatural, just an acknowledgment of interconnectivity in all things.

Superficially glancing through their respective Wikipedia articles, both these American women writers were born in California, their lives overlapping by some 30-some years (I hate math). Did they meet, I don’t know. Were they aware of each other, certainly Didion would have known of Jackson, though she hadn’t published much before Jackson’s death so it’s not too likely the other way around. Any similarities between a modern gothic writer and a journalist? I’m sure Jackson’s work extends beyond her most popular pieces. Maybe?

Speaking of resonating with gothic horror, welcome to 2022. It’s only the 10th and I’ve finished two books. Not leaving without a fight, 2021 ended with my first Covid test of the pandemic – negative, thank the gods.

My year went mostly well, everyone I love made it through, and I’m trying not to get over-confident 2022 will hold anything grand or I’ll just let myself down, won’t I.

Let’s focus on these beauties:

The challenge is to choose 12 books – one for each month – plus two alternates, should any of the 12 prove impossible or just plain too long to finish.

1. The Great Believers – Rebecca Makkai
2. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers – Jenn Shapland
3. Willa Cather: Double Lives by Hermione Lee
4. Soul of the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life – JC Oates
5. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography – Philip Roth
6. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
~~7. Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion~~ – finished
8. Hill – Jean Giono
9. Blindness – Henry Green
~~10. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings – Shirley Jackson~~ – finished
11. Lucy Gayheart – Willa Cather
12. On Being Ill – Virginia Woolf

Alternates:

Aiding and Abetting – Muriel Spark
The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

I’ve cut down social media – save Instagram – to free up more time for reading and apparently that helped. I’ll be reading other books but these twelve I’ve hand-selected for this specific project.

Welcome to 2022.

Allons-y, y’all.

Back from Willa Cather Country.

19-07-21 / Lisa Guidarini

Red Cloud, NE – childhood home of Willa Cather.

After more than a year in lockdown with my out of control mind, a few days in Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, NE helped me decompress and put aside the crazy. It’s a tiny spot on the map, plopped down in a sparsely-populated, very politically Conservative state. With a population of 1,095, the town is so quiet I half expected skittering tumbleweeds. I drove so long without seeing another soul, I began to suspect the Rapture had left me the sole representative heathen in possession of all the bounty – a prospect that appeals, friends. I didn’t test the theory, but I suspect a person could stand in the middle of pretty much any highway in Nebraska for hours straight with zero danger to personal safety.

Things are a bit quieter there.

Joking aside, Nebraska is ruggedly beautiful. It’s peaceful, and the people I met were unfailingly friendly and kind. On a couple side-trips from Red Cloud, I pulled over to check my GPS was behaving because it seemed to have problems navigating with multiple destinations. Two of those times, locals pulled up to ask if I was okay, seeing I was a woman traveling alone. One Nebraska farmer didn’t just confirm I wasn’t in distress, he invited me to come back and see his house all lit up at Christmas – all 25 feet of Peace on Earth.

These are not things in the Chicago metro area. This is not the norm. I gathered that in Nebraska, it is.

Pretty Nebraska, start of the Great Plains.

My Red Cloud trip was as close to unplanned as it’s possible to be, without running the risk of finding myself without lodging. I rented a charming, tiny home via Airbnb and checked that the Willa Cather sites would be open in the middle of the week. That was it. I figured there were groceries to be had, a couple restaurants, all the basics. And there were, but I didn’t realize how early the sidewalks roll up. Arriving just after 4:00 p.m. the first day, once I’d settled in I thought dinner in town sounded appealing, seeing as I hadn’t stopped to eat on the 10-hour drive, fueled by Triscuits and cheddar cheese alone. Unfortunately, a quick Google revealed the grim truth: Red Cloud does have a handful of places to find food but all of them – except Subway and a gas station that serves pizza – were closed or would be closing in the next few minutes. The local population doesn’t support restaurants open all day every day, as is the case where I live. There is a wine bar, curiously, but as it turned out they’re open only Thursday through the weekend. And I was not there Thursday through the weekend.

Bummer.

While I said I planned nothing, I had packed a few groceries – food for a couple meals, plus granola and shelf-stable milk for breakfast. Pandemic food, basically. I learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to starve, but it was disappointing there was no charming little cafe on main street serving home-cooked food, as I’d dreamed of in my imagination. That was true of the entire trip. I availed myself of Subway once, from sheer necessity and convenience while out driving around. Otherwise, I stopped at a bar and grill for a burger my last day, hoping for some of that Nebraska corn-fed beef. You know how on TV you’ll see the stranger walk into a restaurant and people stop talking, turning to look? That. I grew up in a very small town that could smell an outsider. I get it. I’ve also travelled a lot and been the only American, even more uncomfortable than walking into a spot small-town locals hang out. There’s no malice in it. It’s not my favorite thing, but you get over it.

Considering I didn’t actually check the map to gauge the distance between the place I rented and the Cather sites, I serendipitously found myself a 10-minute walk from her childhood home – almost literally around the block. Before you go thinking that’s miraculous, remember – Red Cloud is SMALL. There is literally one North-South road, one East-West road. If ever there were a town with my name written all over it, it’s this. Even I cannot get and stay lost in a town of this size.

The place to start touring Cather Country is the National Willa Cather Center. It’s on Main St. You cannot miss it. It’s outsizedly huge in Red Cloud’s downtown. The museum is phenomenal. I cannot overstate how impressed I was by the holdings in the museum, the short film introducing her life, bookshop, and town tour that, at $ 20, is one of the best deals it’s possible to get anywhere. I’ve been to a lot of author’s homes, in the U.S. and abroad. This is one of the most impressive set ups I’ve seen, as far as amount and quality of information and access to resources. It says a lot that I went to Red Cloud with a vague idea Cather was important and left feeling an obsessive need to learn more.

She was a fascinating human being, in so many ways. A precocious child, Cather’s intellectual interests were indulged and encouraged by her family. Virginians who left partly because of their Union sympathies. the Cathers arrived in Red Cloud when she was nine years old. At the time, some of the major buildings hadn’t yet been built. Real estate was her father’s business, and he set up his office in the downtown area.

Young Willa loved music and was active in school productions held at the Opera House. She read extensively, and this tiny town of rural immigrants fed her imagination. The people she knew became characters in her books, not always in an entirely flattering light. But her passion for Red Cloud and support of its institutions even after she’d moved away endeared her to them. They may not have approved of everything about her, but the townspeople had great affection for Willa Cather.

Original wallpaper. Cather took it in payment from her job at the drugstore, putting it up herself.

I fell for her, too. Between the museum, the tour, the books I bought and have started reading, and drives around her dramatic Nebraska landscape, I developed a literary crush on this larger-than-life editor, critic, novelist and writer of short stories. She’s enthralling, as much for her adventurous, world-traveling spirit as the deceptively quiet, focused fiction she wrote about the place she grew up. Willa Cather did not write solely of Nebraska, but her most famous works are portraits of the citizens of Red Cloud.

I selected Edith Lewis’s bio of her partner from the pile of books I staggered out of the museum carrying, flying through it too quickly to fully digest. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record is just that – a somewhat rough sketch of Cather the writer, created by the person who knew her best and lived with her for decades. Lewis writes about some of the works, not delving into literary criticism or deep study. There is nothing written of their relationship, not one personal anecdote, which disappointed me. I wasn’t looking to be titillated; I’d hoped Edith Lewis would relate everyday stories, informal portraits of what their life together was like. The book is anything but intimate. Lewis refers to her partner formally as “Willa Cather” throughout, never Willa, never Cather. It was a good introduction, if biased.

Deeper study will need to come from other sources.

Willa Cather and Edith Lewis shared their lives for more than 40 years, from 1902 to Cather’s death in 1947.

My few days in Red Cloud gave me what I needed: quiet respite, the peace of solitary wanders through the stately Great Plains, and the opportunity to become acquainted with an iconic American writer. It left me with more questions than answers, more avenues to investigate than epiphanies – which is precisely the way I like it. I never want to reach the end of all roads leading toward literary exploration.

Parlor, Cather family home. Table in left foreground is original to the house.

Hold that thought, Red Cloud. I just may be back someday.

Writing from Hemingway’s birthplace: Many True Sentences

16-06-2116-06-21 / Lisa Guidarini

Parlor – Ernest Hemingway birthplace, Oak Park, IL

It’s dead quiet. If the spirits of the Hemingways are here, they’re gliding noiselessly.

The entire first floor of the Hemingway birthplace is all mine for the day, not a soul disturbing my peace. Closed to tours, the only other sentient being in the place is the maintenance man’s wife, working from the basement because their power is out. Just me and the ghost of young Ernest, born in a bedroom above my head. He lived here from birth through age six, not a very long time. Not a big percentage of his life. Still, a formative period.

It is so Victorian, so opulent and over-wrought. Beautiful, in its exaggerated way, reminding of starched shirts and generous skirts with bustles. No one would be slouching as I am on the velvet chaise, of that I’m sure. Hardwood trim intricately carved, heavy furniture with thick brocade fabric, flowery wallpaper awash with pink roses on a Wedgwood-blue background. Carpet is true to the period, bright red with flowers mirroring those on the wall. It smells strongly of air freshener. Oppressively so. It’s cool and dark, save for this part of the parlor, awash in sunlight. In fact, I wish I had a heavier sweater.

I’m finding it tough to settle. Could be the Hemingways aren’t as thrilled to have me as I am to be working here. Could be ADHD. Pretty sure we know the answer to that.

Visitors keep popping by, walking around the porch. I’m working on my DO YOU MIND? glare. A family with kids. I’ve dragged my children to their share of dead writers’ homes. I can probably guess what they’re thinking: when’s lunch and why should I care who this guy was?

Why, indeed.

The parlor, looking toward my workspace.

Imagine a young Ernest Hemingway barrelling down the stairs, running down to the kitchen to beg for a treat, servants either flustered or endeared, who’s to say. In my mind he was precocious. How could he not have been? The boy who’d go on to win the Nobel Prize. Backing up, think of the tender infant Ernest, cooing with milk dribbling from his wee rosebud lips. The tiny child who’d morph into the barrel-chested man bursting with toxic masculinity.

I cannot not feel self-conscious about where I am. It’s difficult to process. I’ll probably sit bold upright in bed tonight and yell out I HAD ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S HOUSE TO MYSELF. Instead of setting a goal for my first visit, I’m absorbing like a sponge. If it were Woolf’s Charleston, Austen’s Chawton, or Faulkner’s Rowan Oak I’d be a puddle on the floor.

In Hemingway’s house, I can be sensible. Maybe it’s best I’m here instead? Said the woman who hasn’t been offered the other options. And I hear you saying you’d switch with me. Sorry, no dice.

I’ll take it.

The air freshener’s starting to give me a headache. I’m starving, but I’m not leaving for lunch, not squandering a minute. I’ll eat while I’m waiting out rush hour traffic later. Or on the way home. Food’s a secondary consideration; I can enjoy that anytime. What I can’t get anywhere else is the oppressive weight of this scent I’m trying without success to ignore. It’s to the point I have to ask what on earth they’re masking. Would Victorians have gagged their visitors with scented oils?

I think not.

I can hear the maintenance man’s wife on the phone, working I suppose. Her husband left for whatever his day job is. Maintenance here can’t be that demanding. I wasn’t paying attention, if he told me. The tour he gave was cursory, leading me through the upstairs rooms as a matter of course. He stopped by the room where Hemingway was born and said some people break down there, dissolving in tears, which he couldn’t understand. I understand it but it doesn’t move me to that extent, personally. The maintenance man isn’t a docent. He said he could make things up as we go if I’d like. That may have annoyed me, in another author’s house. No offense intended to Hemingway, but it doesn’t here.

Again, I’ll be back and I’ll have read more about the house before I am.

I’ve visited the Hemingway House before, taking the tour lead by an actual docent. I’m sure they were a decent docent. Do I remember much? Why, no. Afraid I don’t.

The kitchen. I could seriously use a snack.

I don’t worship at his altar but how can this not be affecting. Of course it is. If I were of the romantic sort, I’d wax lyrical about his spirit remaining embedded here. I am not romantic. A true thing: The Old Man and the Sea bored me to tears in high school. Nick Adams grabbed me marginally more. Hemingway is just so American. Unappealingly self-important, at least until you know more of his past. The bravado hid a little boy who never quite grew up, stunted by a painful childhood.

Raised by a cold mother, the little boy who pattered through this house felt unloved. He acted out. Kids do that when they’re trying desperately to win their parents’ attention. He grew up continuing to act out. Depression grabbed hold of his ankle and it never let go. Depression would kill him. It killed others in his family. A terrible legacy. Learning more about him hurt my heart. It also brought me to more of an apprecation of Hemingway the man. I couldn’t dismiss him anymore.

The library. Books are of the period, not original. Damn.

Matter-of-fact words, one true sentence after another. A form of greatness I appreciate only now – before sitting in his parlor, but only just. I’ve been aware of him a very long time but I am a Hemingway newcomer. I don’t have literary criticism to offer; I haven’t gotten that far. Bits and pieces, visits here, his home in Key West, Shakespeare & Co in Paris. Impressions, supplemented by Ken Burns and his brilliant documentary. I thought that would send more people clamoring here. Sounds like not, unfortunately. There’s a sign appealing for money in the front yard, next to the birthplace sign. Surely artsy Oak Park won’t let their hometown hero’s home run to ruin.

Along with Hemingway, Cather has recently crept back into my sphere of interest. Next week I’m visiting her home in Red Cloud, NE. What hath the pandemic wrought, that I’d settle on mid-America as my first trip after the country opened back up? I love the Pacific Northwest, love New England. I love/hate the South, home to my god Faulkner. But no, none of these tried and trues. But Cather. I stopped feeling the necessity of applying logic so long ago. It’s tedious and, frankly, who has time to care.

My familiarity with Cather surpasses my knowledge of Hemingway, but only just. I’ve read Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia – My Antonia twice. Her writing’s so quiet, as I recall. Modern like Hemingway’s, yet not identical. It needs a literature lover to appreciate the meaning of such a nonsensical sentence. If you’ve read this far, I can only assume you, dear reader, are at the very least sympathetic.

Sarah Orne Jewett convinced Cather to concentrate her books on the sphere she knew, as Jewett did herself with her native New England. As with Cather, I’ve read little of Jewett, finding her work slow-moving and, dare I say, of little interest. Jewett is a minor American writer. Did I get away with saying that? She is. Cather is greater. I’ve also visited Jewett’s house, by the way. I was on a family vacation and didn’t drag the kids in but we did poke around outside. I saved the inside visits for later in the trip, for Melville, Wharton, Twain, and Hawthorne.

All about pacing when dragging kids on literary excursions.

Haven’t had much time to connect the dots between Cather and Hemingway. I mean, aside from these twinned visits. It’s nothing I strategized, no big literary study plan. As long as I’m doing things directly related to them, seems to me I’d find interest researching how and if they connect.

Lo and behold, they do! Tenuously, but considering they were contemporaries and very high profile, unsurprising. Hemingway famously despised Cather’s description of WWI in her Pulitzer-winning One of Ours, claiming it was taken, scene by scene, from Birth of a Nation. For her part, Cather disliked usage of profanity in writing, something she could not admire in Hemingway. As for any other connection, that’s yet to be determined.

I’ll keep reading, keep indulging curiosity.

“Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere” (Selected Letters 105). – Ernest Hemingway

Thank you to the Hemingway Foundation, thanks to Karma or whatever’s aligned the stars in order for this to all come about. I’ll be back over the course of the year, though I’m not yet sure when. In any event, it’s been an extraordinary experience.