On Willa Cather

I’m hoping to sneak in just before the finishing post on Virago Reading Week, which has been such a hit across the blogosphere. I am a huge fan of Virago, with their distinctive forest green covers and that emblem of the bitten apple, reminding us via Snow White and her evil stepmother that so-called ‘domestic’ stories retain some of the greatest power and punch in literature. Plus you have to admire a publishing house that has remained true to its ideals for over 30 years in a turbulent market place. Anyway, those Virago novels represent the kind of works I often like best – exquisitely observed stories of profound human interest, written with timeless elegance.

And my goodness me, did I find that in bucketloads with Willa Cather. I’ve long been meaning to read her and having finished A Lost Lady, I instantly ordered three more of her novels. She is wonderful! Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, well, yes, I suppose several people did in fact mention it. A Lost Lady is a portrait novel, recounting the story over many years of Mrs Marian Forrester, the young, vibrant wife of an elderly railroad pioneer. ‘There could be no negative encounter, however slight, with Mrs Forrester’, the narrative tells us. ‘If she merely bowed to you, merely looked at you, it constituted a personal relation. Something about her took hold of one in a flash; one became acutely conscious of her, of her fragility and grace, of her mouth which could say so much without words; of her eyes, lively, laughing, intimate, nearly always a little mocking.’ Marian Forrester is a rich creation, delicately balanced over triumphant femininity and its darker, needy, unsteady underside.

The marriage to Mr Forrester might, in less accomplished hands, become an empty caricature, with the much older husband always seeming beyond the reach of his delightful young wife. But Mr Forrester is also a beautifully drawn character, and we understand their mutual attraction: ‘When he laid his fleshy, thick-fingered hand upon a frantic horse, an hysterical woman, an Irish workman out for blood, he brought them peace; something they could not resist. That had been the secret of his management of men. His sanity asked nothing, claimed nothing; it was so simple that it brought a hush over distracted creatures.’ This portrait of a marriage is delivered from the perspective of Niel Herbert, a young boy at the start of the novel, a middle-aged man by its end. He worships Mrs Forrester with a young boy’s idealism, but his own trite conservatism and his tightly-grasped ideals mean that he can neither understand nor help her when she falls on troubled times. Willa Cather manages quite brilliantly to sustain sympathy for Mrs Forrester, and it is Niel we judge, for his uptightness and his ineffectual attempts to save her from herself.

When I’d read the book and was having a quick look around the internet at other reviews, I came across a quite brilliant one by Rachel, who is co-hosting Virago week with Carolyn. So I suggest if you click on the link if you want to read any more about this novel.

I have to say I have become quite fascinated by Willa Cather herself, one of those extraordinary writers who shot to fame in her own lifetime for doing something different and unusual. I just love this picture of her, taken in 1927 by Edward Steichen.

She was in the middle of writing Death Comes to the Archbishop when it was taken, and on a creative roll, having written in steady succession, Song of the Lark, My Antonia, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House. In my introduction to A Lost Lady, A. S. Byatt suggests that what interests her most in writing is energy: ‘She has a great novelist’s capacity to show human beings almost as forms of energy: children and adolescents unable to imagine death: the transient sexual ferocity of youth: the unusual power of those who are survivors: the decay of power in all, even in those passionate creatures she most admires.’ And passion was paramount for Cather; she had written in one of those old-fashioned autograph book memes that it was the fault she could best tolerate in others, whilst she was most disdainful of ‘Lack of “nerve”’. Can’t you see that from this photo of her here? She looks rooted in the ground, a powerful and steadfast oak tree of a woman, bearing her creative fruit with casual good nature and charm. Her authority, her good will, her sparkling intelligence, all I think are plainly visible in her face and her stance. She knew exactly who she was, right then, and her life and her vision were unfolding, unapologetically, as she wished.

One of her biographers, Rachel Cohen, felt that Cather had received vital writerly advice just at the moment she needed it. A very young Cather had become friendly with Sarah Orne Jewett shortly before she died and a strong bond of affectionate respect grew between the women. But Jewett felt that Cather was writing for the wrong audience, and so she sent her a letter, telling her ‘In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality – you can write about life, but never write life itself…To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.’ This letter had a significant impact on Cather, and she took up all of her suggestions. ‘She grew into a writer of unshakeable discipline and conviction,’ Cohen writes, ‘she wrote of Nebraska and her Virginia childhood; she became, as the years went on, increasingly solitary; she was known for her wide outlook upon the world; and as she wrote more and more of history, worked with just those subjects in which Jewett would most have delighted.’
That’s what interests me about Cather: she was never a lost lady, but one who found herself and her perspective and held onto it with steady grace.

Critical Distance

I’ve been working on edits to a small article over the past couple of days and on the whole, the editors’ suggestions have been sensible and helpful. But the one point of contention that really sticks in the gullet and still has me holding my head in my hands when I think about it, is the argument made (in order to counter my own argument in the piece) that Hemingway could be considered a muse to Martha Gellhorn. Hemingway? We’re talking about Ernest Hemingway, right? Not some long-lost brother of his, who happened to marry Gellhorn later, because let’s face it that was a woman with a lot of relationships to get through? Ernest Hemingway, who sucked the vitality out of every woman he married, who exploited them, ignored their emotional needs, insisted they serve his every whim? The Hemingway who argued and physically fought with Martha Gellhorn because she wouldn’t give up her work for him, and who bewildered him by her inability to ‘tag along and like it’, as other wives had done? This man is to be considered a muse?

Obviously my own reaction here is disproportionate. I admit to it in print so that I can laugh at myself later, when I’ve stopped going around saying ‘Ernest Hemingway? A muse?’ in scandalized tones. But I also admit to it because I tend to think of myself as being quite good at taking criticism – or at least let’s say extremely experienced at it – and here is a little example where I am not being so good. The thing is, if I’m wrong, I will readily accept it. But I really hate to be told I’m wrong by someone who doesn’t have their facts straight. What makes editing worse is that it’s often done anonymously in my profession, so you can’t have a conversation about it. I know that if I said to the editor in question ‘Oh come on! Surely you cannot think….’ And the editor replied ‘Oops! Well, okay, I guess that wasn’t a good call,’ I would dismiss the matter from my mind in an instant. It’s having no right of reply that turns a simple mistake into a one-sided titanic struggle.

I was discussing the matter of criticism of both editorial and reviewing kinds with my friend and colleague at work the other day. We were having lunch in her rooms and she was crying with laughter over the thought of Hemingway as a muse (‘He must be spinning in his grave right now!’). But then she was telling me about a friend of hers, a fellow academic who had published a well-received book only to be felled by a particularly bad review. At one point in this book, which we must imagine to be several hundred pages long, the friend-author had got a date wrong. It was the only mistake in the book, but the reviewer picked on it, magnified it, and used it as the basis for his contention that this was a terrible book that did a disservice to the profession. The friend-author was now traumatized, and refusing to put in for promotion at work because she couldn’t face the thought of the possibility of rejection in her now fragile frame of mind. My own friend, with whom I was lunching, said that something similar had happened to her over a typo in an article. The peer reviewer had spent two paragraphs on the typo, which was clearly a typo, abusing the piece because of its jarring presence. Not that my friend was devastated by this; she simply withdrew the article concerned, leaving the editor spitting with fury and declaring her unable to take criticism.

And here we finally reach the topic of the day – this question of being able to ‘take criticism’. It seems to me so central to the practice and the study of the arts. Wherever you look, in schools, in universities, in cinemas, in books, on stages, there are people risking their all to produce something intriguing or challenging or beautiful or funny and lined up opposite is a bunch of people preparing to tell them that it didn’t quite work. Now, it’s absolutely essential that if it really didn’t quite work, those people get to know about it. There is no self-development without learning from mistakes. But at the same time there is so much criticism to be had, and much of it is unhelpful at best, hostile and aggressive at worst. When I belonged to the writing site, Litopia, it was a favourite reproof to throw at other vulnerable or wounded writers that they should ‘toughen up’ or grow a hide like a rhino, or else they weren’t fit for the profession. And yet how many decent writers are thick-skinned? On the contrary, it’s their very sensitivity that turns people into artists. There is a big difference, I think, between the idea of being on the receiving end of sharp criticism and the reality of it. The felt experience is always profoundly unpleasant, and certainly no one I know, thin skinned or thick, ever responds with anything other than shock and distress. So, this doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be criticism, it just means that some serious thought needs to go into its wording.

You don’t have to be a learner in education or in art for long before you realize that there is a spectrum along which criticism falls. Some, the best criticism, is genuinely constructive. It’s easily recognized because it is motivating and encouraging. Even if its consequences are wide-ranging, it doesn’t matter because you are invigorated to try again, this time with improved resources. I was lucky enough to have a PhD supervisor who gave this sort of criticism. She always saw what I was trying to do, and helped me to do it to the highest standard. I cannot tell you how satisfying this was, and a blessed relief after years of other professors effectively saying ‘No, that isn’t how I would write this piece, that’s not the argument that occurs to me; do it again, but this time on my terms.’ Not that this is as bad as the kind of criticism that inhabits the other end of the spectrum, and which I don’t doubt we have all experienced at one time or another. That’s the kind of criticism that is hatred and annihilation dressed up as good advice. I seriously think it should be an offense worthy of a fine, to be caught out giving this kind of criticism. That or a compulsory trip to the therapist’s office.

I’ve been on both ends of this process, giving and receiving criticism, and both are tricky in their way. I’ve caught myself overreacting to small errors in pieces of work that have a disproportionate effect on my judgment (although I hope I’ve always had the self-awareness to recognize that I was the one at fault in those instances). And I’ve had to swallow unkind and unhelpful criticism and make the best of it. But I’ve also received good advice and given it, and seen my own work, and that of my students, blossom and grow. What I think is that giving criticism is an art, just like the art it purports to judge, but not enough is made of how very important it is to give the right kind of critique. It seems to contravene some basic human right, to tell people they cannot just be rude and harsh if they feel like it. Well, certainly people can think what they like in the privacy of their own home, but when that opinion is used in the service of ‘helping’ another person, then some finesse is required. I know it’s a sickness in the academic profession to which we turn a blind eye, and even at times encourage, so long as those who are rude and harsh do it with sufficient cleverness. If criticism is hard to take, it’s even harder, I think, to give well. And now I will get over myself about Hemingway as a muse (a misguided suggestion but by no means an unkind one) and try and do a decent job on my edits….