Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner

Notes

notes introduction 1. Urgo, Cather and the Myth, 107–8. While the essential argument of this book is contained in these two pages, Urgo’s phrase for it was used in a printed interview about the book, with Karl Rosenquist as interviewer , published in wcpmn&r 61, no. 1 (1997): 16–21. 2. The two-volume The World and the Parish contains dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Cather’s reviews of her contemporary writers as well as performing artists. For her reading of romantics and modernists, see Rosowski and Middleton. 3. Skaggs, “Willa Cather and the Father of History”; see also Williams . 4. See “My First Novels (There Were Two),” in Cather on Writing, 89–98. 5. The first list of such references was in Wittenberg’s “Faulkner and Women Writers.” 1. a starting point 1. “In a letter to Ferris Greenslet dated January 21, 1928, Cather said she would not comment in print on another writer’s book. . . . She proclaimed in a letter of February 6, 1930, that she would never comment on a living writer’s work” (Chinn, 72 n. 7). 2. Blotner says Faulkner’s eyes were hazel (1:211) while Cather says they were blue. 3. Cather’s “painted ships” analogy may be designed to suggest Homeric epics, artful and idealized designs, or the narrative “constructions”| 177| 177 of official history. What Faulkner picked up here is Homer. He uses the name throughout his early published pieces. In “A Rose for Emily,” for example, he features Homer Barron—clearly a resonating name. 2. buzzing 1. This cover is replicated in Roorda’s “Cather in the Magazines.” 2. I cannot help wondering whether Faulkner is hinting through this name his accurate perception that Cather paints in Henry James’s colors as she wanders toward Oz. 3. See Skaggs, “Cather’s Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet,” 199–200. 4. Cather may get her association with Augusta from a Henry James character in Roderick Hudson named Augusta Blanchard, who paints pale watercolors. 5. Cather, ob 162. According to James Woodress, “Before Breakfast” was written during the summer of 1944, “but the effort was costly” (498). It was published in this posthumous volume in the year following Cather ’s death on April 24, 1947. 6. Go Down, Moses may have triggered Cather’s writing the story. It answers her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, as we shall see. 7. The overtone divined but not heard is suggested, of course, in the essay “The Novel Démeublé.” 8. Cather used the line to describe the sentiments of her own first published essay on Carlyle, placed without her knowledge in the Lincoln Journal. She said the bitter feelings were roused in her by a fervid reading of Carlyle (Woodress 72–73). 3. possession 1. For further information on Viola Roseboro’ see Skaggs, “Viola Roseboro’: A Prototype.” 2. According to Susan Snell, “When the house burned, the Stones lost not only Faulkner poetry manuscripts, but also, as they listed in an insurance inventory, files for ‘numbers of years’ of Poetry, the New Republic , the Double Dealer, as well as ‘others now quite rare’” (72). 3. Amanda (Brooke) Ethridge presented this and other basic facts concerning Faulkner and Tom Outland at the Tenth International Cather Seminar, Red Cloud and Lincoln ne, June 18–25, 2005. 178 | notes to pages 25–43 4. The three peaks of those buttes, however, are oddly reminiscent of the three mountain peaks mentioned on Ahab’s coin in Moby Dick. The odd chance-choice-design theme Cather develops is also, as we have mentioned, reminiscent of Queequeg’s loom theme, mentioned in the last chapter. Faulkner’s love of Moby Dick is well known. 4. the sounds become fury 1. The novel was featured in Nebraska’s “One Book, One State” reading campaign in 2005, after Chicago initiated the idea by hailing it as the book the whole city was reading in 2003. Oprah sold millions of Faulkner books through her Faulkner summer of 2005. 2. Susan Snell, author of Phil Stone of Oxford, kindly wrote me in 1992, “Stone’s book orders at New Haven’s Brick Row, a year when he/they seemed to be buying all current serious fiction, does include a request for Cather’s My Ántonia in June, 1922.” 3. As far as I know, Joseph R. Urgo was first to suggest this fact in a paper he read for the Faulkner section of the...