Willa Cather and Her Work

REVIEWS WILLA CATHER AND HER WORK' PHILIP CHILD The late E. K. Brown did not live to see the publication of his critical biography of Willa Cather. All but two of the chapters were, however, written by him, and full notes and book markings for the unfinished chapters enabled Mr. Leon Edel to complete the book. The author's Introduction, broken off in the middle by the aposiopesis of death, has been carried on by Mr. Edel in a Foreword with which he combines a moving and fitting memorial to the author. We owe gratitude and admiration for Mr. Ede!'s generous and skilful immersion , in the body of the book, of his own style in the style and purpose of the author. This is a book which E. K. Brown was singularly fitted to write. He had made Willa Cather the subject of published critical essays, and his Alexander Lectures, Rhythm in the Novel, concerned as they were with the subtleties of structure, word texture, and symbols , and referring richly to her artistry as one of his examples, were in a real sense a preparation for this book. So too was his patient research into his subject'S moods and phases of artistic growth, and into her impressions of the many real people and places which were to be the prototypes of fictional characters or the sources of mood backgrounds to her novels. He went to see for himself those places which had been her inspiration, soaking himself in their atmosphere, and he succeeded marvellously by a feat of the creative imagination in seeing them through the eyes of the child she had been, and then the girl, and then the woman. Best of all there is a clear aflinity of spirit between E. K. Brown, the humanistic critic who admired the values of Arnold, and the novelist who in a world increasingly strident and sensational devoted her "cadence and tone of voice" to the "vision of essences,>' who in her best books preferred to underwrite rather than to overwrite and who learned to use the telling power of skilfully constructed symbols, rather than the massive material documentation of the realists, who revolted against a present engaged in cutting itself off from its roots in the past and whirling the untethered heart and undedicated spirit in its passing gusts of lWilia Cather: A Critical Biography. By E. K. BROWN. Completed by LEON EOEL. New York: Alfred A. Knopf [Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited], 1953. pp. xxvi, 352, viii. $4.00. Willa Cather: A Memoir. By ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT. Philadelphia and New York: ] . B. Lippincott Company [Toronto: Longmans. Green & Co.]. 1953. Pp. 288. $4.00. 197 198 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY doctrine and ideclogy, and who (to use Mr. EdeJ's phrase about Brown himself) wrote with craft and subtlety and urbanity. In writing what is subtitled A Critical Biography the author adopted the principle "that the person was to be studied not for herself but for the light her life and character might cast upon her art." But to say that the biographical treatment is in support of a critical purpose is also to imply that in the case of a writer like Willa Cather, whose writing issues from the core of her character and experience, nothing less than a large-scale study of her as a person will provide the means to the desired end. For, as the author rightly emphasizes, Willa Cather became the kind of artist to whom the past, particularly her own past, provided both the spur to her creative effort and also much of her material: recollection of moods, people and places long brooded over, and of her own life experiences. These, subjected to her special sensibility and maturing character, and undergoing creative sea-change in the memory, provided her with themes, characters, scenes, episodes, and atmospheric background. Not only must the critical biographer show how this or that person, event, or place, emotionally apprehended at one time in her life, found its way into the theme and structure of a story or novel perhaps long afterwards, but he must also show how the phases and moods, the failures and successes, the rebellions and struggles and...