Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium (review)

Reviews 257 Still, this is a diverting, unpretentious work which both amuses and delights. It is with somewhat greater expectations, therefore, that one awaits Voss’s second book, now in preparation. WILLIAM A. BATE, George Washington University Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium. (North Andover, Mass.: Merrimack College, 1974. 142 pages, with bibliography, $2.50.) The publication of Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Sym­ posium provides yet one more piece of evidence supporting Dorothy Van Ghent’s prediction a decade ago that Cather’s stature will withstand those “obscurations” which happen to a major writer with the changing genera­ tions. The book, edited by John J. Murphy and published by the college, contains addresses given at a symposium commemorating the centennial of Cather’s birth. While the essays may not be of uniformly even quality, their publication makes its own desirable contribution toward enlightenment in areas where there might otherwise be obscuration. Particularly helpful in this regard are Bernice Slote’s “Willa Cather: The Secret Web,” drawing on the essayist’s study of Cather’s journalistic writing and of books belong­ ing to Cather in her early years, and John H. Randall Ill’s “Willa Cather and the Pastoral Tradition.” Other essays include one by Murphy on the differing conflicts and ideals in the Nebraska novels and the Catholic novels, one by Richard Giannone emphasizing the importance of the human voice and sound in Cather’s writings, and an essay on “The Poetics of Willa Cather” by Lillian D. Bloom. In “The Secret Web” Slote comments on Cather’s sense of humor, her sometimes “wicked” pen, her reflection of the W'hitman “spirit,” and on the “apparent simplicity, actual complexity” of Cather’s art. “In reading all of Willa Cather’s known journalistic writing published before she wrote a single book (hundreds of thousands of words), I find her a young woman quite astonishing intellectually with a background of reading and knowledge that seems to have no boundaries,” Slote writes. In opening his discussion of pastoral elements in Cather’s writings, Randall notes that the author was “something of a classics scholar” during her student days at the University of Nebraska, and he comments that “it was the countryside that brought forth Willa Cather’s deepest response in writing during her great creative period; it is to the countryside that she turned for subject matter when she wanted to express what for her was the essence of life in America.” Randall first sets forth a definition drawing on modern theory of the pastoral. Citing William Empson (paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln), Randall writes “pastoral is of the people but not by 258 Western American Literature the people or for the people. It is for sophisticated city dwellers much like the poet himself.” The pastoral elements Randall traces include the “ironic contrast between two worlds,” the poet’s “dissociated sensibility” which arises “because modem city life has gotten out of tune with the cycles of nature,” and the pastoral writer’s concern with the “real problems” of life — “death, love, time, etc.” Randall finds in Gather a feeling “that the olden times were best, and that the good days are gone forever.” He argues, however, that when Cather was an escapist in her prairie novels, that situation “usually arose through deviation from the classical pastoral norm as in the ending of My Antonia which drowns in a wave of nostalgia which is very beautiful but nostalgia nonetheless.” Bloom and Giannone both include in their discussions Cather’s com­ ment on artistic creativity: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplic­ able presence of the thing not named . . .”. Bloom goes on to show how the view is reflected in the principles and rules of Cather’s fiction, while Giannone shows how the view led Cather to emphasize sound. “The eye is the scientist’s way; it quantifies the object. The ear is the poet’s way; it synthesizes,” Giannone writes. “Alexandra’s auditory, intuitive response to the land [in O Pioneers/] reaches into a life-rhythm that corresponds to the continuous flow of time.” HENRY HAHN, Modesto...