Willa Cather: Writing at the Frontier. - book reviews

Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that this brief critical biography of Willa Cather--an introductory study published originally in England (Berg, 1988) and evidently aimed at British readers--is slanted dramatically toward the novels. As happens far too often in Cather scholarship, the short stories do not receive the attention they deserve; worse, too often the impression is created inadvertently that the stories are of value primarily as markers in Cather's personal life or in evolution as a novelist.

The early piece entitled "The Garden Lodge," for example, is mentioned only in passing--and only because its character Caroline Noble was "perhaps" inspired by Ethel Litchfield, a Pittsburgh acquaintance of Cather. Likewise, "Uncle Valentine" and "A Death in the Desert" are noted because they feature characters modeled upon another Pittsburgh friend, pianist Ethelbert Nevin. If not for their tenuous connections to people from early in Cather's career, one wonders if these stories would even have been mentioned. Certainly no effort is made to discuss them as discrete texts, as works of art, in the way that Ambrose so ably discusses Cather's novels. Similarly, even the palmful of stories that receive more than passing reference, such as "Erich Hermannson's Soul," are discussed with an eye to the extratextual. Though Ambrose makes excellent observations about this story's use of landscape, art, and sexuality, those points are not developed to anywhere near the degree they deserve. Instead, the discussion emphasizes the fact that the story evidently reflects Cather's personality ("Cather seems to have put something of herself into the character of Margaret Elliot, a restless, unsatisfied young woman who comes west for a taste of freedom before settling into marriage") and inticipates the (presumably greater) Cather novels: Eric, for example, is said to have the "splendid physical beauty" of Emil Bergson, plus the "awkwardness" of Claude Wheeler.

Ambrose's unfortunate tendency to downplay the short fiction also extends, not surprisingly, to Cather's story collections. Youth and the Bright Medusa is accorded all of one paragraph (yes, seven sentences) by way of illustrating that "life did not stand still" for Willa Cather during "the four years that elapsed between the ideas for One of Ours and its publication in 1922." Busy Willa evidently filled the spare moments in her novelistic career by writing stories about creative people, including several that showed women artists "fall[ing] prey to greedy Philistines in the form of relatives, husbands and music coaches." Distortive in its simplicity, this generalization overlooks the complex portraits of the creative individuals in that collection, including the businessman-as-failed-artist (not "Philistine") in "A Gold Slipper" and the homosexual artists of "Paul's Case" and "The Sculptor's Funeral." Perhaps even more than novels, story collections elude tidy generalizations; one must consider each story individually, as well as the stories working collectively as a unit. A paragraph of commentary simply cannot do justice to a book as tightly-woven and thematically-dense as Youth and the Bright Medusa.

It is too easy to argue that Willa Cather: Writing at the Frontier should not be expected to attend adequately to the short fiction. After all, there's only so much one can cram into so few pages, and most readers are interested only in Cather's novels. But should they be? And if they are, isn't it at least partly because otherwise-competent, well-meaning critics like Ambrose emphasize novels at the expense of short stories? That emphasis is unfortunate in any scholarly study, but it is perhaps most regrettable in an introductory-level book. Readers approaching Willa Cather for the first time would certainly benefit from a more balanced overview than this.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Studies in Short Fiction
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