The Song of the Lark

The Song of the Lark
by Willa Cather
read: 2016

The Song of the Lark isn't a perfect book - Cather herself found flaws with it - but I think the story of Thea Kronberg will stick with me a while. In part, that's because I still have a lot of questions: why does Dr. Archie serve as a framing character, the lens through which we see Thea at the beginning of the story and in the final section? Does Thea ultimately choose to compromise her career (unlikely) to marry Fred Ottenberg, or does Fred compromise his desire to have a family (more probable)? Does Fred divorce his wife or does she die? What happens to Wunsch, and why don't we get an epilogue of his story as we do for the other father figures in Thea's life? Why bring Spanish Johnny back at the end, and what does Thea failing to notice him mean?

I've written about Cather's empathetic, all-seeing eye before, and that is present in this story. Thea's journey to becoming an accomplished artist leaves little room for the people around her. Her single-mindedness is both her best quality and her worst. This quality attracts others to her, but also forces her to keep them at arms' length. Her passion for her music cannot be contained; either she pursues it absolutely, or she cannot reach her aims. Cather does not praise this decision, or condemn it; she knows - and Thea knows, too - that there are benefits and drawbacks to whichever path the heroine pursues.

O Pioneers!

O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
read: 2015

Immigration is something of a hot issue in the news, so it is interesting to read a novel like O Pioneers! which deals with new immigrants from groups that are now long-established. The Bergson family are Swedish-Americans that inhabit frontier Nebraska in the early 1900's, but they still have memories and traditions from their homeland. The French, Swedish, and Romanian immigrants of the time and place all have their own culture but are working together to make it in a strange, new America. It's a nice reminder that we were all aliens here once.

One of the themes of the novel is the relationship between mankind and nature. Protagonist Alexandra says at one point, "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years." The first part of that quote is the novel's most famous, but I think the second part is just as interesting, implying that in many ways people are hardly different from birds. The land provides sustenance for Alexandra and her family, and her life is inextricably tied to the land, but she wants her younger brother Emil to be able to transcend an agricultural existence and experience more of the world.

Cather's empathetic, all-seeing eye reminds me of Faulkner or Toni Morrison, She has sympathy even for those who do wrong, and seeks to explain rather than condemn.

One of Ours

One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:

All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

  
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #61

I like to think of myself as an enlightened person, but occasionally I find myself humbled. I didn't know anything about Willa Cather and assumed basically every female author from the early part of the 20th Century was writing novels about romance or family. I was surprised to pick up Death Comes for the Archbishop and find myself reading a Western. I was also blown away; it's an amazing book, one of the most beautiful, inspiring, multi-layered, and poignant novels I've ever read.

There are lot of different lenses through which to view Death Comes for the Archbishop. The friendship between Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant runs like a backbone through the novel and the scene where the Latour sends Vaillant away for the last time rings with poignancy. The two men display different models of faith, with Vaillant's unwavering while Latour struggles with doubt at times. The story is also an examination of the Southwest, with Cather painting the physical beauty of the environment and also the cultural landscape, as the various Spanish, Mexican, Native American, and American influences shape society. And while the story isn't a Western in the sense of cowboys and gunfights, the priests are portrayed as heroic, overthrowing corrupt priests and helping the poor and needy with little regard for themselves.

The most interesting thread running through the novel was the role of tradition and legacy and how it differed between the Indians and the Europeans. Bishop Latour observes the European tradition early on the novel, when sampling Father Vaillant's onion soup:

"I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph," the Bishop continued, "but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup."

The Bishop observes tradition in the Native American people, too. But while the Europeans share their gifts with the world, the Indians hide theirs:

It was said that this people had from time immemorial kept a ceremonial fire burning in some cave in the mountain, a fire that had never been allowed to go out, and had never been revealed to white men.

Bishop Latour learns this difference between the cultures, judging that "it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it," while "it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything." On returning to France late in his career, Latour decides he will spend his final years in the Southwest where "the wind made one a boy again." But while he notices that this pure, unspoiled quality "vanished after they were tamed by man," Latour is still a man of the European tradition, and in his great act as Archbishop builds a Cathedral in Santa Fe even though few seem to appreciate it. Is this a noble act for the future good of the Church and the people of the Southwest? Or is a selfish act for Latour's personal legacy, emblematic of the way the white man is destroying the unsullied nature of the land? Or both? The ambiguity reflects the complexity of the novel and Cather's empathy for all viewpoints.