Suffering with Willa Cather: The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop

Suffering, though it embittered Hamlet’s nature, could not poison it.

—Willa Cather

FOR some time in my courses and lectures, and recently in my written work, I have been making the case for a new approach to the literary art of Willa Cather. Though her books are widely read and much admired, we have been less successful in identifying and reaching agreement about what it is in her writing that makes Cather special and that leads readers to respond to her with such a heartfelt sense of connection and esteem. Biographers and scholars in recent decades have provided ample descriptions of context and setting (especially the Nebraskan prairie and the Southwest) and have examined the topics of race, ethnicity, and gender—the degree to which we should perceive Cather as a gay woman and interpret her as a gay author is hotly debated. As I have tried to show in an essay on O Pioneers! (Hopkins Review, fall 2015), Cather’s first important novel, the source of this writer’s appeal is more fundamental, more profound.

Cather’s keynote, the dominant theme that in her writing affects us from beginning to end, is suffering—the disappointment, hurt, and sorrow in the soul, and the imperative for men and women to make the most of life despite suffering’s abiding presence in it. For Cather the challenge that every person faces is living in suffering, fastened to a body in the process of decay and aggrieved by memories of missed opportunities. In O Pioneers! we perceive Cather’s initial exploration of the themes that mattered to her most, but it is the later novels, which function thematically as one, that are the climax of her art. The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) extend and deepen everything she came to understand about life, love, and death.

Cather is not only an exceptional writer but also a major blues artist—this is how I have been drawn to characterize her in her early and mid-career work and, above all, in the eloquent pairing of The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Billie Holiday, and John Lee Hooker, Cather is attuned to the duality of suffering. She knows that suffering means not only to be in pain or distress or misery, sustaining an injury or harm, but that it also means the patient endurance of pain, tolerance of it, even consent to it. We suffer the loss of something or someone in two senses: we experience this loss, then we bear and brave it, holding ourselves together. As the cultural critic Albert Murray often said, the blues are about striving to make the best of bad situations, of coming to understand how to cope with living. This is the wisdom of the blues and the wisdom of Cather’s writing.

Claude Wheeler, in One of Ours (1922), says to a friend, “Don’t you feel that at this rate there isn’t much in it?” The friend asks: “In what?”, to which Claude answers: “In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to bed—nothing has happened.” “When you lie down at night,” said bluesman Lead Belly, “turning from side to side, and you can’t be satisfied no way you do, Old Man Blues got you.” But one could reply that life is not like this—that the essence of life is not suffering. Cather’s characters and plots, however, attest otherwise. From reading her we remember, notes the critic Stephen Tennant, “the burden of unspent feeling,” and “the unanalysable loneliness that lies deep within each human soul.” “The blues,” W. C...