Chasing Bright Medusas

Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love.  Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world's work ever get done.

- Willa Cather (1874-1947) in a 1945 letter to a friend

Just finished reading Benjamin Taylor's new biography of Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas.  It's a literary biography, well-written, and clocks in at less than 200 pages, a relief in an era where door-stopper biographies are more common.

Over the past year I've read two Cather novels, My Antonia, and Death Comes For The Archbishop.  Cather is a wonderful, vivid, yet subtle writer, with powerful descriptive abilities when it comes to settings, landscape, and character.  My Antonia set in the central Nebraska prairie lands in the late 19th century, where Cather grew up, portrays the struggles and everyday lives of a multicultural cast - mostly immigrants from northern, central, and eastern Europe.  Death Comes For The Archbishop is a masterpiece, beautifully written and moving, one of the finest novels I've ever read and one I will return to.  The roughness of mid-19th century New Mexico is the setting for an unusual tale.  Told in episodic vignettes over the years, with settlers, renegades, and native Mexicans and Indians, along with guest appearances by the Navajo elder Eusebio, and Kit Carson, the story centers on the first bishop of the new diocese, Father Latour and his vicar Father Vaillant, both native Frenchmen, who set out to build a cathedral in Santa Fe.

It is a moving portrayal of faith and friendship.  At one point, Latour says to Vaillant,  "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.  I do not see you as you really are, Joseph, I see you through my affection for you."

Taylor quotes a Catholic critic writing of the book when it was published in 1927:

Her book is wonderful proof of the power of a true artist to penetrate and understand and to express things not a part of the equipment of the artist as a person.  Miss Cather is not a Catholic, yet certainly no Catholic American writer that I know of has ever written so many pages so steeped in spiritual knowledge and understanding of Catholic motives . . . 

In our modern era when to write of something beyond your personal experience is dangerous and may even lead to the failure to be published, it is refreshing to read this perspective from a century ago.

Cather was a phenomenon even as a child.  She was class valedictorian in 1890 (though, to be sure, it was a class of three!) and can you imagine hearing this from a 16-year old:

There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.

She would end of spending most of the rest of her life in the East; Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, Maine, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada.  Taylor tells of her two great loves, both women, one of whom she lived with for the last four decades of her life, though he notes that sexuality and sexual matters seemed to play a small role in her life.

According to Taylor, Cather was "a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial", her "deeper theme: the nation as a gathering of peoples from elsewhere, adding Americanness to some earlier identity".

He goes on:

What sets her apart from her younger contemporaries - Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - is that her idealism about American possibility was unironic.  What makes her the greatest of anti-modernists is that ideals were what were most real to her.

Cather expressed it best in a 1922 address:

There is such a thing in life as nobility, and novels which celebrate it will always be the novels which are finally loved.