Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Willa Cather and Her Public in 1922

27 Willa Cather and Her Public in 1922 J A N I S P . S T O U T Recent scholarship has substantially displaced the once widely accepted image of Willa Cather as an otherworldly aesthete , withdrawn from society in general (though with a few selected intimates) and unconcerned with material matters. Such a view of her was fostered in the memoir published by Edith Lewis, her devoted and protective companion, in 1953, six years after Cather’s death. There, Lewis emphasized Cather’s singleminded devotion to her literary discipline, insisting that although her response to people was naturally warm, she was compelled to “withdraw more and more from the world” for “selfpreservation ” as an artist (135–37). Similarly, but with somewhat different emphasis, both James Woodress and Hermione Lee maintained in their late-1980s biographies that Cather had an “obsession with privacy” (Lee 72 and 185; Woodress, Literary Life 141 and 475). A great deal of evidence supports such a view, to be sure, and the understanding of Cather as withdrawn, uncommunicative, and uninterested in the trappings of success has in some measure persisted. But the obsession Woodress and Lee refer to was primarily a characteristic of her later years, not her years of busy career building.1 We now recognize that the Cather of the early 1920s was not yet the unapproachable person, wrapped in disapproval of social realities, that she later became. One of the most important challenges to the convention of Cather’s reclusiveness was Brent Bohlke’s invaluable 1986 collection of interviews and other public statements, Willa Cather 28 ja n i s p. s to u t in Person. The materials in this volume compel us to recognize Cather’s interest in public issues and her at least sporadic availability to the public media. Indeed, it has recently been demonstrated that on at least one occasion her desire for publicity was such that what appears to be an interview was in fact “an autobiographical fiction created by Cather herself,” in effect a press release for which she wrote “both her own words and those of her interlocutor” (Porter 55).2 In addition to the documents he collected , Bohlke presented an incisive introductory argument that Cather suffered a “civil war” in her personality: “Willa Cather courted and enjoyed public notice, yet she loved anonymity and seclusion. She was enamored of the notice of the press and deeply resentful of the intrusions the press made upon her time and energies. She sought fame but disliked attention” (xxi). Sixteen years later, in 2002, Sharon Hoover extended Bohlke’s work by completing and editing his compilation of published and unpublished reminiscences of Cather in Willa Cather Remembered, a volume that demonstrates the breadth and liveliness of her various acquaintances and public roles beginning with her college days. The notion of Cather as a withdrawn aesthete jealously guarding her privacy has also been effectively belied by various elements of the Scholarly Editions of her works, notably essays by Charles Mignon (on My Ántonia) and Susan J. Rosowski (on A Lost Lady). Both of these essays trace Cather’s negotiations with her publishers, allowing us to see quite clearly how knowledgeable Cather was about the business of publishing and how deeply involved she was in decisions affecting the publication and advertising of her work. My purpose here is to extend this revisionist challenge of the once-standard image of Cather by taking, as a case study, her professional activities during a single year, 1922, as they relate to her involvement in the construction of her public reputation. In discussing a different but related case study, Cather’s change of publisher from Houghton Mifflin to Knopf, Rosowski emphasizes her desire to “protect her books as well as herself from commercial pressures” (178). My emphasis is instead on her desire to enhance her commercial success and public standing. Yet it is important to recognize that the two efforts existed side 29 Willa Cather and Her Public by side—dramatically so in this year when Cather was working on A Lost Lady (as Rosowski points out, “the first novel Cather conceived and wrote knowing that Knopf would publish it” [Historical Essay 177–78]) and at the same time engaging in the savvy business dealings I will trace here. Primarily I will do so by reading two specific sequences of letters—those relating to arrangements for her summer lecturing at...