Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination

Admiring and Remembering

Admiring and Remembering The Problem of Virginia A N N R O M I N E S “Life began for me,” Willa Cather famously said, “when I ceased to admire and began to remember” (Sergeant 107). Literally , of course, life had begun for her in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in the Reconstruction days of 1873. In the more than nine childhood years Willa Cather lived there, in Back Creek Valley , she found much to admire. According to Edith Lewis, Cather’s “Virginia life was one of great richness, tranquil and ordered and serene,” free “from all tension and nervous strain” (12). But Cather discovered early that admiration, a largely passive state of acceptance and celebration, was not a mode in which she could grow as a writer. Another of Cather’s often-cited Virginia anecdotes , recounted by Lewis, is the story of the “old judge who came to call at Willowshade [sic], and who began stroking her curls and talking to her in the playful platitudes one addressed to little girls.” The child “horrified her mother by breaking out suddenly : ‘I’se a dang’ous nigger, I is!’” (13). Among its many other implications, this is a story about the dangers of admiration—and of becoming its passive female subject. And it indicates that, even as a small girl, Willa Cather knew another story about Virginia, one that encompassed violence and racial (and perhaps gender and class) tensions. When the young Willa Cather began to write fiction at the University of Nebraska, Virginia memories were among the first resources she turned to. “The Elopement of Allen Poole,” published in a university literary magazine when she was nineteen, is a melodramatic tale that awkwardly tries to represent Virginia 273 274 ann romines mountain dialect; its plot concerns a poor white bootlegger (a common Blue Ridge occupation) who is shot by a revenuer en route to his elopement. The narrator affects an easy familiarity with Southern manners and class conventions: “It takes a man of the south to do nothing perfectly, and Allen was as skilled in that art as were any of the F.F.V.’s who wore broadcloth” (19–20). (An F.F.V. is a member of a First Family of Virginia, as Cather assumed, perhaps erroneously, that her Nebraska readers would know.) But what is most skillful about this story is its precise evocation of a place that the young author has not seen for ten years. Readers of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, published forty-seven years later, will recognize many local particulars—Bethel Church, Timber Ridge (here renamed Limber Ridge), the swinging bridge over Back Creek—and above all the botanical, environmental specificity: “sleepy pine woods, slatey ground. . . . the laurels . . . just blushing into bloom. . . . the fields of wheat and corn, and among them the creek . . . between its willow-grown banks. . . . the mowers swinging their cradles. . . . the Blue Ridge . . . against the sky” (20). In this lucid microcosm, wild and cultivated plants and local geology seem to coexist in a harmonious ecosystem. Yet, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has astutely noted, the story is laced with violence, not only Allen’s murder but his fears, as he dies in his lover’s arms, that he might have lived to abuse her. In 1896, Cather made another attempt to use her Virginia sources, with “A Night at Greenway Court,” a swashbuckling tale of Lord Fairfax, her great-great-grandparents’ patron, whose nearby Virginia estate she had visited as a child. This story seems a rehearsal for A Lost Lady, with a star-struck youth defending the honor of a lady and a lord by an act of discretion—the refusal to relate the memory of a duel—that costs him a king’s favor. Although he is in England and far from Virginia, the young man has no regrets, he says, “for I had kept my friend’s secret and shielded a fair lady’s honor, which are the two first duties of a Virginian” (61). The question of what “the first duties of a [displaced] Virginian ” might be to her memories of her native state must have been telling to Willa Cather in her early Pittsburgh years, her first 275 Admiring and Remembering extended separation from her beloved Southern family. One of the best stories from those years, “The Sentimentality of William Tavener,” is a probing study of how memories and relics...