Willa Cather documentary

[Music] she had riveting blue eyes and a deep voice she smoked cigarettes and talked tough she broke every barrier society put in her path she wanted to be like dickens do you want to be like virgil she wanted to be as big as the big guys willa cather wrote some of the most unforgettable fiction of the 20th century a book is made with one's own flesh and blood of years she said it is cremated youth it is all yours no one gave it to you she had none of the connections she had none of the resources she made her world she made these things happen she was almost 40 years old when she wrote her first novel it was in her own opinion a failure she found her voice as a writer only when she had the courage to face what frightened her the most [Music] out of her earliest memories came her first great books o pioneers the song of the lark my antonia and what really counts in the long run is the feeling it leaves you with that feeling that you have about the book by antonia ten years after you've read it you can still feel that willa cather won the pulitzer prize and became one of the best-selling writers in america but as her fame grew she became ever more reclusive sharing her secrets only with the few she trusted before her death she burned most of her letters she asked her friends to do the same i want no pictures made i want no movies made i want no letters kept and she had all these requests kether felt that her her life belonged to her and her work belonged to the people and you know what she was right i'm interested in her life i want to read i want to know i do want to know [Music] but it's not my right the end is nothing willa cather said the road is all we find the story of her life in the pages of her books [Applause] [Music] the snow spilled out of heaven like thousands of feather beds being emptied in the crowded clutter of their cave the old man had come to believe that peace and order had vanished from the earth or existed only in the old world he had left so far behind in her novel my antonia willa cather tells a dark tale of the frontier a story of despair and a dugout on the plains the scene haunted her because the frontier was the transforming experience of her life [Applause] she was born into a very different world [Music] a settled world of trees and valleys and a long family history [Music] in her last novel she shared one of her first memories [Music] i was in my mother's bedroom in the third story of a big old brick house entered by a white portico with fluted columns propped up on high pillows i could see the clouds drive across the bright cold blue sky throwing rapid shadows on the steep hillsides willa cather was born in 1873 in back creek virginia cather's mother was a spirited woman who disciplined her children with a rawhide whip her father made little leather shoes for his favorite sheepdog so it wouldn't cut its feet on the rocks she was named wallela after her father's sister but everyone called her willy she was the first child in her mother and father's family and the first female grandchild i think in the larger family and she was incredibly pampered everybody did everything for her being born so soon after the civil war meant that she was also born into a very intense mythology willa cather's family was split in two by the civil war her uncles had fought for the south but her grandmother had helped a slave to escape and her grandfather was a union sympathizer who prospered after the war needless to say the cathers were not popular with their neighbors [Music] one winter their sheep barn caught fire under suspicious circumstances she stood there and watched the barn burn and she heard what it sounded like for these animals to die [Music] cather's grandparents had already left virginia for the great plains when they heard about the fire they begged cather's parents to leave virginia where the house would be next in 1883 the cather family set out for nebraska those who went west weren't just going in order to find the promised land they were also leaving something intentionally leaving something behind they took nothing but her mother's good china which was wrapped in confederate bills and she was going to a place that she hadn't heard of and all she knew about it is that there were indians and people died out there and it was very dangerous many years later in her novel my antonia willa cather relived the experience [Music] cautiously i slipped from under the buffalo hide caught up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon there seemed to be nothing to see no fences no creeks or trees no hills or fields there was nothing but land not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made kathy said that the crucial experience of her life was the move to nebraska and i think initially it was scarifying i think she felt as though her skin had been ripped off and she says when she got to nebraska she felt as if she had been erased that she had been thrown on a a piece of sheet iron land as flat as she ironed with no identity and nothing left to her and she was terrified absolutely terrified it became part of the memory from what she drew throughout the rest of her life becoming that much a part of a place means that you're forever changed your memories are now are now embedded within you you don't get another set as gather said she cried for a year she said and so did her mother but nobody paid attention to either of them [Music] gradually she ventured out riding for miles on the open land she met her neighbors bohemians scandinavians swedes french germans they had come from the old country in search of the promised land but in this new and frightening world they held on to their own language and customs as long as they could young willa found them fascinating she spent hours listening to their stories in a mix of language from the old world and the new she said that i always felt they told me so much more than they said and that's that was a great triumph that means she really had um several languages as a writer to work with you know she had the people's talk the country and i had it out together cather said and by the end of the first autumn that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion i have never been able to shake [Music] it has been the happiness and the curse of my life but willa's father wasn't cut out to be a farmer after two years on the open prairie he moved his family to the little town of red cloud nebraska where he became an insurance agent many years later when cather began writing novels she used red cloud as a model for all her small towns she changed the name to sweetwater skyline moonstone blackhawk and haverford but they're all red cloud in disguise in little towns lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about their wings almost touching on the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes you must if you walk abroad at all at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world her skirt brushes against you you say good morning and go on it is a close shave [Music] the wonderful thing about her evocation of small town america is that it's never sentimental and she knows how stifling it can be she knows how limited it can be her underlying affection is always there the catheters lived in a small house on third street a house that became increasingly crowded seven children a cousin a grandmother who slept in a passageway cather remembered that her father traveled a lot and that her mother was always pregnant in this frontier town virginia cather remained a southern belle the vanity the narcissism and yet it's clear from the way willa depicted her that she recognized there was formidable will and a kind of real intelligence i think she loved her mother very deeply [Music] i'm quite sure she didn't want to live a life like her mother's i'm very certain of that when she was 14 willa cather reinvented herself for the whole town to see willa went to the local barber and had her hair cut off she got a crew cut she wore suspenders she wore a derby um she strode about in a vanished fashion cather was trying to get attention and and give a message about herself i'm going to be different i'm going to have a real life i'm going to have an exciting life and the first step is um i'm going to be a guy cather experimented with her new persona in local theater productions she usually chose the male role she played the merchant father in beauty and the beast to enthusiastic reviews she took to wearing a confederate cap in honor of her uncle who had died fighting to the south at panasos she decided she wanted to become a doctor and began signing her letters william cather md the town had two doctors and they were very important people and they were both very kind to willa cather and you wouldn't find that nowadays they took her out in their buggies when they went on house calls they let her help she was given the great gift of not being told who she was or how she was to be she was the given the great gifts of that nebraska blankness of the plains in which she didn't go through a proscribed kind of education a prescribed kind of family life everything was contested everything was up for grabs everything was new red cloud was a raw prairie town but it valued culture as much as any big city traveling road shows performed regularly at the opera house on main street and willa cather attended nearly every performance she said she didn't care if a play or musical was good or bad as long as it fired the imagination there would be flyers about and then she would go and she would wait for the curtain to rise and it would be a world within world i can remember as a child coming home from the ballet or the theater and you go into your room and you are beside yourself cather shared the second floor of the house with four younger brothers she always remembered the attic as a private space where there were no older people poking about to spoil things willa was the only one with a room of her own a tiny bedroom i think that cather had a sense a very clear sense of a very very rich world beyond her individual life beyond red cloud beyond herself and that she was so hungry for it that she wanted it so much cather as a child was desperate uh to grow up to have an interesting life she wanted power she wanted to do things have great adventures uh she read everything she read carlisle she read shakespeare she adored kipling she uh she read the romantic poets cather was an extraordinarily intelligent person she was not a normal person not just intelligent but intensely intensely curious [Music] when she was only 16 willa cather left red cloud for college in the state capital of lincoln her parents made a sacrifice to pay for her education and from the minute she left home they knew she wasn't coming back in 1890 cather arrived at the university of nebraska with big ambitions and no idea of the painful struggle that lay ahead she chose to major in science but changed her mind when a teacher published one of her essays in the lincoln newspaper up to that time i thought i would like to study medicine she wrote but what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print it was a kind of hypnotic effect i think she realized quite soon in in her excellent professors let her know that she could have her a life she could have a life as a writer she could have a life in the arts in her junior year cather became managing editor of the campus magazine the hesperian years later one of her colleagues remembered the truth is the hesperian was willa the rest of us looked wise and did nothing she filled the magazine with her own short stories plays and essays including one on the poetry of football it makes one exceedingly weary to hear people object to football because it is brutal of course it is brutal so is homer brutal and tolstoy the moment that as a nation we lose brute force or an admiration for brute force from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left she wrote theater reviews for the local newspapers earning a dollar a column enough to cover room and board willa cather earned a reputation as a fearsome critic her editor was impressed many an actor wondered on coming to lincoln he said what would appear the next morning from the pen of that medax young girl mediocrity is of all things the most hopeless that is what is the matter with lewis morrison he is fairly good miss effie elsler is a well-meaning little woman with an impossible little nose an irritating placidity of manner and a shrill domestic little stage shriek that is suggestive of mice [Music] i think she was a very opinionated young person she had an idea of how she wanted la boheme to be sung um and and and she hadn't seen so many productions that she wasn't still a little bit shocked that it didn't meet all her expectations she was young i hear someone very smart and very independent and also before we had the term cultural critic that's what she was many of those pieces talked about the way people in lincoln didn't dress properly for the occasion but as critical as she was katherine knew greatness when she saw it she compared a performance by sarah bernhardt to a flash of lightning gone before you see enough of it and indescribable in its brilliancy [Music] by the time she graduated willa cather looked nothing like the boyish girl who had arrived in lincoln from red cloud five years before but her ambition burned hot as ever she couldn't wait to get out of nebraska she said she was afraid of being buried in a cornfield in 1896 she made her break she took a job in pittsburgh editing a ladies magazine called the home monthly it paid the rent but left her dissatisfied there is no god but one god and art is his revealer cather wrote to a friend that's my creed and i'll follow it to the end to a hotter place than pittsburgh if need be [Music] pittsburgh was indeed hot with smoke and dirt from steel and iron mills but the wealth that industry created brought the finest art and music to the city cather was dazzled a girl from nebraska on the outside looking in but the door to wealth and privilege opened sooner than she expected she met the daughter of a judge a young woman named isabelle mcclung [Music] she was beautiful graceful uh extraordinarily flattered and impressed by cather's um intelligence and talents and they fitted each other's fantasies perfectly i think probably isabelle taught her how to shop had a dress had to be elegant had to be a beautiful woman it freed her to love women and to love herself as a woman isabelle invited willa to move in with her family and gave her a room of her own a small sewing room where she could write well this is priceless you know to be nurtured and appreciated in that way and you know i i think it also suggests to us how lonely cather had been and how lonely she had had to be to get as far as she had [Music] in 1902 willa and isabelle traveled to europe for the first time cather saw the places she knew only from books she loved france above all french literature food and culture would forever be her ideal the two of them enjoyed each other's company traveled together they made a life together happen that would have been impossible for either one of them alone we are so um narrow in our definitions of love and i think it was absolutely love cather said that she wrote all of her books for isabel but since both women burned their letters their relationship remains mysterious we don't know whether cather and isabel were lovers and indeed we don't know whether cather ever had a lover in the sense that we define that in other words somebody she went to bed with if cather was in fact homosexual then that's important because it means that she had a very strong force in her life that was anathematized by the society there is not a word in a word she has written that gives us the impression that this woman had first-hand knowledge of sexual passion there is nothing she has ever written that makes you feel she understands what goes on between men and women or even between homosexual lovers for me sex is not the word for me it's the erotic and i think it was an erotic relationship with isabel i think it was a fully erotic and loving deeply human relationship of of two women celebrating themselves as women together undoubtedly in a private world of their own by 1903 cather saw her first book in print april twilights a collection of her poems two years later a book of her short stories was published by ss mcclure of the famous mcclure's magazine in new york city mcclure was impressed with cather's talent and he offered her a job but first she would have to say goodbye to the comfortable life she had found in pittsburgh with isabelle and her family in 1906 as automobiles first appeared on the streets of new york willa cather began a new career as editor of mcclure's magazine she had pioneered her way east to the center of it all the excitement in the arts that period is about as rich and and inviting and invigorating and inspiring as any time in our country and new york was coming on the map it was going to be the greatest city in the world s s mcclure launched his magazine in 1893. in the words of one journalist mcclure was the preeminent magazine genius easily first in a period in which magazines flowered as never before by the turn of the century mcclures was publishing a heady mix of top fiction and groundbreaking journalism ida tarbell's history of the standard oil company was just one in a series of sensational articles exposing corruption in big business and government but mcclure's stormy personality exhausted his staff and one by one they left then he discovered willa cather and cather no doubt must have seemed absolutely ideal smart a really good writer hungry like nobody's business to get to new york so he promises her new york he promises a publication and he fulfills those promises the other part of it is he's going to come in there and and by her soul she's she's she is uh now in bondage to this job for six years cather gave her all to mcclure's helping to make it one of the most exciting and profitable magazines in the world as fiction and poetry editor she published her own stories and poems and even chose the critics to review them but she also had to read and edit the work of inexperienced writers a task that made her impatient and highly critical and when she reads these things she says she feels like she's sitting in a tempered bath and can no longer remember the feel of hot or cold nothing could say it better but in fact the years at mcclure were very useful to her they were her apprenticeship so cather then starts to make trips to europe to london to meet writers she meets people like kipling in london she gets to know about the business of publishing i think it made her an incredibly professional writer i mean people who've worked as journalists will write fiction in a certain way they will not write long baggy sentences they will tend to be impatient with developing plots in laborious ways they will not be frightened of making radical cuts between one perspective and another you see this in hemingway you see this in cava on mcclure's staff cather became arguably the foremost woman in american journalism this was the pinnacle of the journalistic career that had been the basic career that she had followed up to this point there she was at the top of the heap of mcclure's of american journalism you know this is a woman who likes authority you know and she's getting it in a very hands-on sense but as much as she loved the power that came with her job willa cather felt trapped she said that editing a magazine was like going around the world on a fast train and never getting off to see anything she wanted that train to stop so she could write a novel we're in the period when the novel you know is becoming the the emblem of um creativity personal expression fiction to be a fiction writer is to be the most glorious and glamorous thing cather claimed to have little respect for women writers they are so few she wrote the ones who did anything worthwhile there were the great georges george eliot and george sand and they were anything but women there was miss bronte who kept her sentimentality under control and then there was jane austen who had more common sense than any of them cather didn't see herself as a woman writer i want to be like dickens do you want to be like virgil she wanted to be as big as the big guys mcclure didn't want to lose his hard-working editor he told cather she didn't have the talent to be a novelist and she feared he might be right but she also feared that if she didn't make a move soon she would as she put it lose her immortal soul in 1912 at age 38 cather wrote her first novel alexander's bridge tells the story of a man who lives a double life because he's in love with two women it's extremely telling in terms of ideas of ambition of success of the idea of two selves a public self and and what cather would call throughout her life a second self and that's the real self [Music] like the novels of henry james and edith wharton alexander's bridge takes place in high society in boston in london on a steam ship on the atlantic some critics found the characters more symbolic than real in the end the bridge that alexander builds collapses and he goes down with his creation when her first novel came out cather felt the same thing was happening to her she didn't have a success not critically not financially but above all not for herself she didn't like the minute the book came out she didn't like it she had failed she failed on her first run but then came a breakthrough cather remembered a letter she had received from her friend the writer sarah orne jewett jewett advised cather to stop imitating other writers to find her own quiet center and right from there but what jewett really said was you know take the leap you know because in this grind which is not simply new york city it is the grind of your daily work it won't happen in the spring of 1912 willa cather took a leave of absence from mcclure's and traveled home to nebraska she would remain forever faithful to her red cloud friends but the small town of her memories was no longer there she continued west to arizona and new mexico looking for the frontier of her imagination she said at the beginning of the trip one thing i could never do i could never just let go and go with the flow and if you can't let go you can't do great work and she knew that at first the vastness of the desert frightened cather in a letter to a friend she wrote that it made her chest feel tight that it reminded her of the panic she had felt when she first encountered the great planes there is a thrill and a sense of uh wonder maybe a sense of danger certainly i would say a sense of your own mortality in a landscape like this and yet it was exciting and at some level made her feel very much alive then in a desert canyon cather had a kind of epiphany years later she would give her own experience to one of her characters the personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her the high sparkling air drank it up like blotting paper it was lost in the thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the thin wind and opinions [Music] when willa cather returned to new york city she had made a decision and so she jumped and she jumped at a time when at the peak of her powers at the peak of her career when she could have either taken on the control of mcclure's entirely gone on to a more even more powerful magazine but she jumped she jumped from a position of power and influence into the unknown she would continue to support herself by writing articles for magazines including mcclure's but for the first time in her life willa cather was working for herself [Music] she began writing a second novel and this time she drew from her own experience of life on the nebraska frontier she named it after a line in a poem by walt whitman o pioneers she had never known before how much the country meant to her the chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music she had felt as if her heart were hiding down there with all the little wild things that crooned and buzzed in the sun under the long shaggy ridges she felt the future stirring and here cather creates an epic character an alexander bergson and puts her in relationship with the land not in terms of mastery she changes the whole the whole paradigm it's not that alexander is going to master the land it's that she is is going to understand it she's going to open herself to it in the largest way probably we could say that it's about american aspirations and about the kind of dark tragic consequences that go with it with all pioneers willa cather had found her voice cather's first novel opened with a description of the gentleman on his way to a tea party on beacon hill said one critic her second in its first sentence disclosed a nebraska town in a high gale of wind for miss cather the wind is at last blowing in the right direction cather's life too was coming into focus she and isabelle mcclung continued their intense friendship but katherine needed a practical partner in 1912 she moved into an apartment with edith lewis a talented editor who worked in mcclure's the two women would live together for 35 years she didn't pick um another writer she didn't pick a painter she didn't pick an actress she picked a safe solid person who devoted herself to willa cather the question arises did edith lewis surrender her genius her talent to support cather's probably but that's [Music] okay catherine lewis shared an apartment in greenwich village cather said the neighborhood reminded her of nebraska it was an immigrant location it's a poor neighborhood she wanted to live in a place where she could hear italian and greek and russian and she talks about sitting in the park and watching the italian children playing in the fountain she could leave nebraska only to a certain degree so this is how she was divided all her life she couldn't live in it but she couldn't really live in new york either so she became willa cather of number five bank stream cather entered the most productive period of her life i work from two and a half to three hours a day she said for me the morning is the best time to write during the other hours of the day i attend to my housekeeping take walks in central park go to concerts and see something of my friends i try to keep myself fit fresh one has to be in as good form to write as to sing in the spring of 1914 willa cather met a woman who reminded her of herself olive fremstand was a swedish immigrant who had pioneered her way from minnesota to the stage of the metropolitan opera [Music] fremstad had recently shocked new york with her portrayal of oscar wilde's salome [Music] she went to a morgue to find out what it was like to hold a severed head and apparently on stage the head was even heavier than she thought it would be but it was that kind of thing that she did that coupled with a great voice that couple of the presence on the flood lived for art when the curtain went down her life and effect was over music singing and that's it cather was both attracted and terrified of that kind of talent all of fremstad's long struggled to become an artist inspired cather's next novel the song of the lark tells the story of thea kronborg a brilliant soprano who grows up in a dusty little town in colorado about a young girl very like cather herself who has something inside of her and she doesn't know what it is and and protecting that until she's ready to let it out [Music] a song would go through her head all morning as the spring keeps welling up and it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged music had never come to her in that sensuous form before like cather theo kronberg discovers her true voice on the bright edge of the frontier in a remote canyon in new mexico she feels the spirits of the ancient people who once lived in the saran land when you are in this kind of a landscape and you are literally in the physical presence of cultures that were here for thousands of years and you know that here are the caves they lived in here are their bones here's the pottery she began to have intuitions about the women who had developed masonry and pottery one morning something flashed through her mind the stream and the broken pottery what was any art but an effort to make a sheath a mold 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 by the end of the novel thea kronborg's life has become her heart in her own words you are not much good until it does in writing through the song of the lark cather was reclaiming her own materials she was claiming the voice that she had let out finally in no pioneers and and preparing herself for the long haul but just as she was hitting her stride as an artist cather lost her muse in 1916 isabelle mcclung married a concert violinist named john homborg cather accepted the marriage because she didn't want her friendship with isabelle to end and although isabelle tried to make it okay for cather it wasn't okay a lot of people have disappointments in love that they never get over and if they all wrote novels we'd know that but i don't think catherine ever got over it one evening in an apartment in new york city cather explained the idea for her next novel to a friend [Applause] she said i want my next heroine to be like this like a rare object in the middle of a table which one may examine from all sides that rare object would become my antonia and willa cather would tell antonia's story through a male character's eyes cather says in the first introduction here's jim's story basically as he gave it to me my own was never told well that's a brilliant introduction because whose story is this anyway male female fiction fact so what cather sets in motion is the whole principle of storytelling more than any other person we remembered this girl seemed to mean to us the country the conditions the whole adventure of our childhood to speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places to set a quiet drama going in one's brain cather took antonia straight from life her real name was annie pavelka a hired girl who worked for cather's neighbors in red cloud cather had always admired annie's vitality in the face of overwhelming hardship grandmother didn't know that willa was writing about her and her family and she wondered why why it had to be she but if she could only understand now the importance of that book and what willa really meant and what willa really saw in her it was her true life wasn't it [Music] in 1880 annie pavelka came from bohemia with her family to homestead on the nebraska prairie and the wagon driver says this is your new home oh no and couldn't you imagine what my great grandfather thought i'm bringing a family of five children to this hole in the ground that was their home their new american home how did you go about building a house on a nebraska frontier when there were no trees you know how did you do that when you got there the first year what did you do how did you survive and she tells us that story [Music] in real life as well as in the novel a heartbreaking story unfolds it was a brutal winter neighbors brought food for the immigrants or they would have died of hunger antonia's father dug a hole near the stove a place for his daughters to sleep and stay warm he never once touched the violin that he had brought with him from the old country great grandfather he just felt so depressed no one to play for he said that he was going to go out and shoot some rabbits with the gun that he had brought over from czechoslovakia and he didn't go and shoot any rabbits i guess kills himself commits suicide can't take it some people are crushed by it it'll either make you or break you that's that's very american theme [Music] antonia is different from her father she survives and even thrives on the frontier she works in the fields like a man she moves to town where she cleans houses all day and dances all night [Music] abandoned by her lover she gives birth to a daughter eventually she marries a farmer and they raise a family together in the final chapter of the novel jim returns to nebraska to see his antonia she was no longer a lovely girl but she still had that something which fires the imagination could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things [Music] and then in an unforgettable scene jim meets antonia's children they all came running up the steps together big and little toe heads and gold heads and brown and flashing little naked legs a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight [Music] that these people coming from another land emigrating to america dug themselves into the earth came at one with the american soil and then sprung out of that as the settlers as the next generation [Music] with my antonia cather had created something new out of the old story of the settling of the west the book was no runaway best seller but the critics loved it journalist h.l menken wrote i know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western prairies more real and none that makes them seem better worth knowing and what really counts in the long run is the feeling it leaves you with that feeling that you have about the book by antonia ten years after you've read it you can still feel that why because of the transforming magic of art because willa cather took that story and made it immortal [Music] the sun was going down in a limpy gold-washed sky just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun on some upland farm a plow had been left standing in the field even while we whispered about it our vision disappeared the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth the fields below us were dark the sky was growing pale and that forgotten plow had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie in may of 1918 an american soldier named g.p cather was killed at the marn in france becoming the first nebraskan to die in battle in the great world war gp was willa cather's cousin the son of her uncle george and aunt frank [Music] cather visited her cousin's grave in france and she read the letters gp had written to his mother from the battlefield soon after she began writing a novel different from anything she had attempted before [Music] the hero of one of ours is no pioneer claude wheeler was born too late he has missed the great adventure of the frontier and life as a farmer makes him feel trapped cather in her writing shows the loneliness of characters who who can't find someone to love a claude wheeler the terrible aching loneliness of of um longing for connection for relationship for love and making bad choices if he could just be who he who he is the moon swam up over the bare wheat fields big and magical like a great flower he went across the yard to the windmill took off his clothes and stepped into the tin horse tank the water had been warmed by the sun all afternoon and was not much cooler than his body to him the sun rotated about the wheat fields but the moon somehow came out of the historic past and made him think of egypt and the pharaohs the slaves quarters of old times prison windows and fortresses where captives languished inside of living people two captives languished yes inside of people who walked and worked in the broad sun there were captives dwelling in darkness [Music] the war began and he joined the army in nebraska he felt like a slave on the battlefields of france he finds a paradoxical freedom he goes to war looking for an answer to it why he was put on this earth [Music] he finds he was put here to be killed [Music] the bullets began popping about him two rattled on his tin hat one caught him in the shoulder the blood dripped down his coat but he felt no weakness he felt only one thing that he commanded wonderful men they were mortal but they were unconquerable she wanted to write a war novel i would have too if i had been there at that time she was very self-conscious about her wish to do this because she had learned you know the hard way that you should write what you know about cather didn't convince those who had seen the war first hand ernest hemingway accused her of stealing her battle scenes from the movies poor woman he wrote to a friend she had to get her war experience somewhere her world war one scenes are a little flat the battle scenes don't quite ring true it's much easier to talk about what makes good writing even for willa cather than to actually do it for her it must have been a nightmare on all fronts you're finding your voice and just as you're there and you're hitting what should be the center of your career people are starting to say you're done you know it's over for you it must have been deeply humiliating those those kinds of criticisms old lady-ish this is horrible but not everyone saw one of ours as a failure many readers and critics found the novel patriotic and inspiring one of ours became cather's first best-selling novel and in 1923 it won the pulitzer prize for fiction for cather it was a bittersweet victory she knew when she saw those soldiers returning on the piers in jersey city from world war one that life was dreadful you saw those soldiers gassed and what it did to the skin i mean who would want to be part of the world that was emerging from that deep down she knew that this was a century of displacement pain suffering and the imposition of a will on another she had walked into a situation emotionally where she knew that the answer was loss she knew that her subject was tragic she couldn't say it she didn't know how she didn't have the courage yet to carry it to a tragic conclusion cather right now is entering the hard time in her relation to the world she'll find her way out but this is a very uncomfortable book in 1922 or thereabouts cather wrote the world broke in two and i belong with the former half well that was it the world broken too and and and most people who were writers had broken two and with a great deal of pain and unhappiness and fear they stepped on the side of the new she stepped back into the old clearly there was a certain kind of um emotional retreat all right you know if you say i'm old-fashioned then i say i belong with the great values of the form of the former half of the pre-1922 years which in fact the war destroyed i'm part of that i was i am part of a world that was whole and she doesn't want to move on because she thinks where the world is going is not a good place but it was far more personal than that in 1922 cather's best friend isabelle mcclung moved to europe with her husband [Music] and so the relationship that for what 17 years had been one of the anchors of cather's life is no longer there and cather said it was devastating cather had always believed that youth was the source of power and creativity now at age 52 she wondered if she had stories left to tell she struggled through her fears in the only way she knew by writing another book [Music] cather in the professor's house wrote i think as dark a book as has ever been written in america and what she did it's really kind of takes her breath away she wrote about the experience that very few people write about which is what happens when the meaning of your life is over long before your life is over the moving was over and done professor saint peter was alone in a dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters godfrey saint peter has written eight historical volumes that brought him fame and money he's just built a new house for his family but he can't bring himself to leave the old one his study is cluttered with memories and regrets his daughters care for nothing but fine clothes and the romance has long gone from his marriage i tried to make the professor's house stuffy said cather then i wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the blue mesa outside his window lives everything the professor once knew adventure the south west and a young man named tom outland who reminds him of his younger self in the professor's house outland tells his own story every morning when the sun's rays first hit the mesa top while the rest of the world was in shadow i awakened with the feeling that i had found everything and at night high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame color with the sunset and the cliff city lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern the story of this cow puncher this ordinary western man climbing up into an undiscovered mesa and discovering an unknown civilization is certainly the metaphor for climbing into your own life and discovering the civilization of yourself and that is what tom outland leaves the professor this knowledge garvey saint peter is all alone now his work has failed him his marriage has failed him his family's failed him the one person that was closest to him tom outland dead killed in the war the world war one killed the best and the brightest [Music] he has nothing to cling to he's an atheist a theos without god where's the source of life uh and this i think is cather at her simplest and most sophisticated late in the afternoon he saw that a storm was coming on the sky was black and the room was dusky and chilly he lit the stove and lay down on the couch the fire made a flickering pattern of light on the wall he lay watching it vacantly without meaning to he fell asleep [Music] he had left his window open because the gas stove leaked but a storm blows the window shut and the flame goes out filling the room with toxic fumes his housekeeper finds him close to death he could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him but now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness as a release from every obligation from every form of effort it was the truth of what saint peter does is to embrace death first he almost does it by dying and that that would be a tremendous mistake on his part in cather's mind also but at the end of the novel he he makes peace with death he welcomes it it's not coming right away but he's living with the fact that he's going to die and that's okay but that means he's going to have to live his life a lot differently now and he sees death not as an attack on his consciousness or on his ego it's not an insult it's not an assault it's part of what he comes to accept with an extraordinary wisdom it's like a tree but he comes out of this changed and cather has written through what it is to give up to give up the self the ego her riding then will be fundamentally changed from that time on the professor could not pack his bags and leave but willa cather could and did in 1925 she returned once again to a landscape that gave her a sense of freedom the high desert of new mexico imagine what new mexico was like when she was there long before it became fashionable or crowded or commercial vividly clear skies where you can see immense distances the landscape that seems to swallow you up and again there's a thrill of this [Music] a landscape of many cultures spanish mexican indian and a remarkable missionary history in 1848 the catholic church sent a french priest to america to bring all these cultures into one fold that priest would become the first bishop of new mexico archbishop lammy and he would build the great cathedral at santa fe [Music] whenever willa cather passed his statue she said she wanted to learn more about a pioneer churchman who looked so well bred and distinguished [Laughter] my one evening in a santa fe hotel cather discovered a book about the missionary priests full of letters and diaries it kept her up all night before morning she said the story was in my mind on the white wall of that hotel room as if it were all in order and color there projected by a sort of magic lantern the story would become one of her greatest novels death comes for the archbishop [Music] one afternoon in the summer of 1851 a solitary horseman followed by a pack mule was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central new mexico he had lost his way and was trying to get back to the trail you're out in the middle of nowhere you have no guide you have no compass you have no map you've never been here before you've got to rely on something it's man and god that's where she puts her archbishop [Music] his canteen empty the priest is about to give up when he sees a fantastic sight for him a miracle and a sign [Music] [Applause] [Music] that means he can't be lost he's got something to draw on and he then has this vision of being led out of this out of this mess by his god all at once father latour thought he felt the change in the body of his mayor the pack mule behaved in a similar manner and both quickened their pace was it possible they scented water if you've ever been lost in the desert or in mountains as i've been lost in the mountains and you find water milagro it's a miracle you know it's your own personal miracle [Music] as the story unfolds the archbishop faces an even greater challenge he clashes repeatedly with the mexican priests who have created their own catholic culture and refused to accept his authority willa cather makes father martinez of taos the villain of her novel but padre martinez was a real person and a hero to many mexican americans she's using historical artifacts which is what a historian would do but she's constructing a narrative that conforms to her vision of the world the idea that americans have the right to invade to conquer to upset cultures to traumatize them and then remake them in the american image she takes the the omniscient point of view the god-like point of view in her narrative but of course it isn't god writing the book it's willa cather [Music] of all the cultures in new mexico territory willa cather sympathized most with the native american in a pivotal scene in the novel the archbishop is traveling to a pueblo village with hasimto his indian god and he is thinking about the enormous gulf that separates their two cultures just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape to change it make it over a little it was the indians way to pass through a country without disturbing anything to pass and leave no trace like fish through the water or birds through the air in the quiet of the desert night macintosh speaks without being addressed the evening star he said in english then relapsed into spanish you see the little star beside padre indians call him the guide the two companions sat each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them the bishop seldom questioned has seen though about his thoughts or beliefs he didn't think it polite and he believed it to be useless there was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of european civilization into the indian mind and he was quite willing to believe that behind jacinto there was a long tradition a story of experience which no language could translate to him what do you think of the stars padre the wise men tell us they are worlds like ours [Music] i think they are leaders [Music] great spirits perhaps they are whatever they are they're great [Music] these are two men whose conditions in life could hardly be more different and they both have the same problem which is trying to figure out um what it's all about you know the ending which is the archbishop's death is so true to the tone of the book that is to say it is not tragic [Music] he had an intellectual curiosity about dying about the changes that took place in a man's beliefs [Music] he observed there was no longer any perspective in his memories he remembered when he was a little boy as clearly as he remembered the building of the cathedral he sat in the middle of his own consciousness none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown they roar within reach of his hand and all comprehensible something whispered to the ear on the pillow lightened the heart softly softly picked the lock slid the boats and released the imprisoned spirit of man into the wind into the blue and gold into the morning into the morning [Music] in 1925 at the height of the jazz age a silent film camera captured some of america's most famous writers and celebrities at the algonquin hotel in new york city willa cather was among them relaxed and confident at the height of her reputation as a novelist a few years later the good times were only a memory the great depression had begun in new york city people lined up for soup and bread on the great plains it looked like the end of the world the prairie cather had celebrated in o pioneers and my antonia was turning to dust in the wind [Music] out of the depression came a new kind of fiction raw realistic anchored in the present [Music] once again willa cather refused to change with the times critics accused her of turning her back on the problems of modern civilization and surrendering to the heroic idealism of a long gone frontier and those lives all bore the marks of a time that was now passed so that when people read her novels it sound they sounded old-fashioned and indeed although she was rich and famous it was rare that she was that she was appreciated by intellectuals or by other artists of her own generation but in spite of the critics readers loved her books by the 1930s willa cather had become a literary phenomenon one of the few american writers who was both a great artist and a popular success shadows on the rock her novel about 17th century quebec was the best-selling book in the country [Music] she appeared on the cover of time good housekeeping magazine named her one of the 12 greatest women in america [Applause] cather saw her novels as high art and resented any attempts to popularize them in 1925 hollywood produced a silent film based on cather's novel a lost lady another version in 1934 starred barbara stanwyck as the tragic marianne forester hated the film so much that she vowed none of her works would end up on the screen again increasingly she valued her privacy she complained to a friend that she couldn't sit on a bench in central park without being accosted by strangers she would check in the hotels and sign the register with a false name so that hahaha people wouldn't know that willa cather was there willa cathy's face had been on the cover of time magazine the everyone knew what she looked like everyone knew when she had arrived i think the attention of the public was maybe for cather in her late years almost abrasive she rarely took speaking engagements she rarely rarely gave interviews she did not want to be in the public eye at all in the summer cather escaped from the city she and edith lewis traveled to rustic retreats in jaffrey new hampshire and grand manan island in canada looking for seclusion and a sense of the frontier on the eastern seacoast she never stopped writing publishing a steady stream of essays short stories and novels including lucy gehart a love story with a tragic ending and her last novel safira and the slave girl inspired by her earliest memories of virginia [Music] [Music] one by one death took the people cather loved her parents her favorite brother even isabelle mcclung to her friends back in red cloud she wrote that she was lonely it was hard to work and she couldn't stop crying she says somewhere that after the age of 45 it rain it rains death this is a rather melancholic phrase that she uses cather detested pity and she understood that pity is a form of fear that we pity people who are afraid to become like and she would have none of it at age 59 cather once again transformed her own struggle into a powerful and universal story [Music] old mrs harris takes the reader back in time to the little house in red cloud where willa cather grew up into a world long gone but vividly remembered it's a story about three generations of women living in the same house the mother victoria who's pregnant the daughter vicky who thinks only of herself and the grandmother old mrs harris well once again we're looking at something that's pretty grim um which is an old lady dying quietly in the midst of a bustling household which pays to her no attention whatsoever the sorrow which is so strong in the story is so controlled oh mrs harris who's seen so much of life and who's so strong and who's planning things in this book who's getting vicky out of the house and on the road this old woman at night has this old sweater which she sleeps with a bit of a knitted warm thing that she holds to her chest you're not going to find anything more painful than that she is welcoming death she's saying i am going i'm going to write about death uh sure yeah come give me come on give me your best shot death i'm going to write back right back at you i have something to say about that [Music] thus mrs harris slipped out of the templeton story but victoria and vicki had still to go on to follow the long road that leads through things unguessed at and unforeseeable when they are old they will come closer and closer to grandma harris and their lot will be more or less like hers they will regret that they heeded her so little but they too will look into the eager unseeing eyes of young people and feel themselves alone [Music] they will say to themselves i was heartless because i was young and strong and wanted things so much but now i know this story is a tour divorce because it's a story of a family the miracle is not that people have different needs the miracle is that somehow we come together and we are there for each other i i think any writer is trying to work his or her way out of darkness there is this eternal battle between lightness and darkness and uh these two are the contending forces and darkness wins every time death but it's overcome ultimately by divine might death came for willa cather on april 24 1947. she was never more herself than on the last morning wrote lewis her spirit was high her grasp of reality as firm as always later that afternoon she died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage willa cather was 74 years old i think she was the only american novelist to truly embody the pioneer as an aesthetic and turn it into an art form she has this ability to create through light through texture through colour through sight through sounds who smell a very very concretized vision of the world i think anyone today can pick her up and read her and feel she makes me feel the life within myself she is echoing she echoes important things about my life when you read cather you enter into the world and the rhythm of her prose becomes the rhythm in which you live for that moment i sat down in the middle of the garden where snakes could scarcely approach unseen the earth was warm under me and warm as i crumbled it through my fingers nothing happened i did not expect anything to happen i was something that lay under the sun and i did not want to be anything more i was entirely happy perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire whether it is sun and air or goodness and knowledge at any rate that is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great to learn more about willa cather visit pbs.org [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] willa cather the road is all has been made possible in part by a major grant from the national endowment for the humanities great ideas brought to life and by the arthur vining davis foundations american masters is made possible by the support of the national endowment for the arts because a great nation deserves great art the corporation for public broadcasting additional funding for american masters provided by dirk and natasha ziff rosalind p walter the blanche and irving laurie foundation judith b resnick and by the following this program was also made possible by and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you thank you

Channel: Author Documentaries

Views: 604,380

Keywords: willa cather documentary, willa cather, willa cather bio, willa cather biography, willa cather biography video, biography of willa cather

Id: _1AJDk9QCkk

Length: 84min 12sec (5052 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021