Between Candor and Concealment Willa Cather and (Auto)Biography
Cather's aversion to having her private business made public sprang in part from her upbringing in a late nineteenth-century middle-class household. In such a household the "boundary between public and private" would have been a given (Corbett 255). But a great many other sources made that aversion not only a constraint on her behavior but a site of conflict. Her socially instilled attention to privacy seems to have been reinforced not only by a deeply personal reticence, as scholars have often noted, but also b a compelling sense of propriety. This sense governed her own behavior (as an adult; there were some notable lapses in her youth) and also served as a standard for judging others. [End Page 467] But the "boundary" between public and private was reinforced, and greatly complicated, by the enforced concealment of her sexuality, once seemingly as "unspeakable" for her biographers as it was for Cather herself, but now generally recognized as lesbian. The issue of privacy, then -- and thus her attitudes toward any form of life writing -- was a deeply conflicted site for Cather, and one often productive of self-contradictions and inconsistencies.
Cather expected public figures, in particular, to maintain a certain decorum. As early as 1894, for example, when she was still a college student writing newspaper reviews and opinion pieces for a dollar a column, she praised the famous actress Eleanora Duse for keeping her personal life to herself. Though admitting that she, too, felt a degree of curiosity about the noted tragedienne, she commended the reticence on Duse's part that frustrated such curiosity. "We know as little" of her private life and personality, Cather wrote, "as we know of Shakespeare" -- a parallel that conveyed high praise indeed (Curtin 57). A year later, in a column about the intense press coverage of Duse's appearance in London in head-to-head competition with Sarah Bernhardt, she again praised the actress's "reserve," and urged that reporters respect her wish for privacy, writing that Duse should be allowed to "keep her secret to herself " (Curtin 207 - 08). When the veil of secrecy was rent in a thinly disguised roman a clef published in 1901, Cather denounced the novel as a "savage and shameless" invasion of privacy (Curtin 861). Yet she herself was known to engage in such invasions, both pursuing celebrities for material for her newspaper columns and writing fiction so closely modeled on actual people that they were recognizable.
If she disapproved, in principle, of journalistic intrusions into the lives of celebrities, Cather was equally repelled when celebrities themselves revealed details of their private lives to the public gaze. Especially when done for promotional purposes, such liftings of the veil of privacy struck her as a mark of poor taste and bad manners. She told her sister-in-law Meta Cather, in a 1946 letter, that she had never engaged in promotional self-advertising. Yet it has been conclusively demonstrated by David Porter that she took a direct role in the production of not one but three separate biographical sketches for promotional use by her publishers, and that she "planted" interviews in newspapers. There is an abundance of evidence that she herself participated in the construction of her status as a public icon. She might frown on such activity in principle, but she was very much involved in promotional efforts that drew on her biography. Moreover, as she achieved a mature aesthetic she believed, like other modernists, that a work of art or a performance should speak for itself, without recourse to personality. Yet she wrote open letters to journal editors (reprinted in On Writing) that commented on several of her [End Page 468] novels in ways that offered both personal and historical explanations outside the text.
The complexities and contradictions of Cather's thinking and behavior with respect to privacy and publicity, intrusion and disclosure, present a significant interpretive challenge as we seek to understand one of the most subtly nuanced literary minds of the earlier twentieth century. In this as in many other ways, she was often ambivalent, tugged in different directions by contrary ideas and impulses; she sometimes evaded, sometimes courted public attention. By no means the stodgy figure of certainty and rectitude that she has sometimes been painted, she fully shared the conflicts and uncertainties of her fellow modernists, plus the added constraints attendant upon her gender and her sexuality.
As we have seen, Cather praised both S. S. McClure and the monumentally interesting Richard Wagner for their autobiographical candor. She similarly praised one of her own journalistic subjects, Olive Fremstad, for the same quality. In a November 1913 letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant asking her if she had seen Cather's newly published article on women singers, Cather noted that Fremstad, one of the most noted divas of the group, had not at all objected to having biographical information about herself revealed in the article. When asked if she minded the disclosures, Fremstad answered that there would be no sense in objecting to what was true.
Yet she did not take such an attitude herself. With respect to her age, for example, she very much minded having the truth known. As David Porter has established, Cather herself was the source of the disinformation about her age that prevailed until the publication of Brown's book in 1953. The erroneous reporting of her year of birth as 1876 rather than the actual 1873 grew out of promotional materials she provided her publishers for publicity purposes. All three of the biographical sketches she prepared for their use shaved three years off her age. In 1933, when Dorothy Canfield Fisher was writing an article about her for the New York Herald Tribune and sent her a draft for comment, Cather telegraphed her asking that she delete the year of Cather's graduation from college, explaining that she hated the thought of people using it to calculate her age. As late as 1945, when she was almost seventy-three years old, she continued the subterfuge by telling Greenslet, who was by then one of her oldest friends, that her recently deceased brother Roscoe had been two years older than she, whereas he was in fact over three years her junior.
We can only imagine how Brown's book might have been enriched if the meeting, or perhaps a series of meetings, that Cather proposed in her letter to him had taken place. With the advantage of direct contact, so discerning and persistent a biographer as Brown (along with Leon Edel, who completed the book after Brown's death) might have been able to draw a connection between her anxiety about her age and the persistent concern with time and loss that we see in her fiction more effectively than we can at this distance. But we can be sure that if Cather had known Brown would locate her birth certificate and spread the information in his book, she would never have invited him to tea. Was she perhaps equally unwitting in admitting into her life in far more intimate ways two others -- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and Edith Lewis -- who would subsequently write memoirs revealing significant biographical information about her? It seems doubtful that she knowingly played Johnson to their Boswell. More likely, she had no inkling of a biographical intention on the part of either. And perhaps there was none, at the time. Yet the books written by both her friend and sometime confidante Sergeant and her life partner (and to some degree collaborator) Lewis remain suggestive starting points for scholars today. After Lewis's and Mildred Bennett's books in 1951, and Sergeant's and Brown's in 1953, the biographical tide became irresistible. If she could have read the far more exhaustive biographies by James Woodress and Sharon O'Brien that came much later, in 1987, Cather would probably have found Woodress's more tolerable despite his fullness of detail and his extensive, scarcely disguised quoting from her letters, because his was more adulatory and it dismissed the issue that O'Brien addressed squarely: her lesbian nature. But we cannot suppose that she would have been pleased to have details of her life explored and laid bare in either of these or in any other study taking a biographical approach -- or that she would at all have approved of the increasing availability of more and more of her letters.
In the last decade of Cather's life, the decade in which she seems to have felt a growing autobiographical impulse, her letters reveal the poignancy of an artist struggling to keep going as she feels her energy failing. In late 1938, in conveying to Roscoe her sense of emotional depletion, she described her work as a kind of succubus feeding off her emotions and ultimately draining her. She was continuing her work on Sapphira and the Slave Girl, she said, but her well of strength and creative energy was running dry and it was getting harder to craft her work, sentence by sentence, so as to create the sharp pictorial effects for which she is now known. Earlier that fall, in the undated letter to Roscoe written from Grand Manan in which she complained of her inability to sleep, she revealed that she was looking back over the course of her life from the Nebraska days to the present, seeing a procession of mistakes, and thinking of last things.
We can only imagine the richness of a memoir in which Cather reflected on her life and work as she does in these letters. We can be confident that if she had undertaken a major piece of self-writing in her last years, it would have looked back over the long course of her life, the places she had lived, and the vibrancy of family relations -- all of it together, as a whole, centered on her work. And not only on her own work, but on the art of fiction generally. We see her reflecting on that art frequently in the letters, and we find sometimes flatfooted, sometimes teasing pronouncements on writing in the posthumously assembled volume On Writing, especially the essays "The Novel Demeuble," "Escapism," and the brief but appropriately titled (by the editor) "On the Art of Fiction." But we look in vain for a published consideration of biography or autobiography. She neither wrote one of her own, nor put into coherent form her opinions on the two related genres. But from the letters, many of them not known at the time the standard biographical scholarship was written, we can see the pieces from which she might have quilted both a memoir or autobiography of her own and a compilation or expansion of her terse, almost cryptic critical statements.
Above all, the letters teach us that Cather was by no means the naive, instinctual writer, out of step with the modernist focus on technique, that used to be presented in classrooms, but one fully involved in the dilemmas and the cultural currents of her time, seriously engaged in thinking about the art of fiction. They also show us that she deeply shared the assumption of many of her fellow modernists that the writer's personality must remain separate and apart from the autonomous work -- though, at the same time, the work was, even at the level of style, the fullest communication of that personality. Her conflicted allegiance to the autonomy of art, complicated though it was by a quasi-romantic sense of expressiveness in art, may finally, despite her occasional forays into self-publicity, have been the clearest reason why Cather never wrote an autobiography.
Yet another reason lurks further in the background, in the form of her own professional experience: her writing of the biography of Mary Baker Eddy and the autobiography of S. S. McClure. The McClure autobiography provided her a model that she might well have chosen to follow in writing about herself: the model of the unitary, upwardly mobile male engaged in "emphatic individuation." But it would have been a model significantly in conflict with the multiple dimensions of her life, a model that psychoanalytically inclined theorists of self-writing have long seen as uncongenial to women, with their more relational sense of self.