Considering Cather and Hemingway: An Unlikely Pairing?
By Michael Seefeldt
Speaking of Willa Cather, can anyone of our readers place this Hemingway quote? (Noting his bumping iambs, his simple declarative clauses, his monosyllabic repetitions, and the Bachian musicality in “made me bite my tongue,” “When the straw settled down,” or “from under the buffalo hide.”)
“I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
Change the “peered’ to “looked” and remove the “Cautiously” (and a couple of commas) and it is vintage Hemingway. Of course those things are there and it is not, but it is very close, and some of you may have recognized Jim Burton’s wonderment in an opening scene from Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
The first quote is Hemingway writing in his fifties (A Moveable Feast), recalling his early Paris efforts. The second is Cather, in her forties, from The Song of the Lark. More:
“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.”
“If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”
“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”
The first and third this time are Cather, from “On the Art of Fiction” in the periodical Borzoi in 1920, and “Four Letters: Escapism” in Commonweal, 1936. The second is a continuation of the previous from A Moveable Feast. Certainly both wrote in a simplified style, eschewing prolix verbiage.
Both also had a close feel for the land, often in reminiscent mode. They wrote rich, but non florid, descriptions of nature, often using nature to create both a spiritual atmosphere and a realistic setting for characters and events. H. R. Stoneback, standing in for Ernest, who tended to be mute on topics closest to his depths, linked the two in his essay “Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway’s Sacred Landscapes” (R&L, 2003, Vol 35.2-3). More prone to address such things openly, Cather used earth metaphors in a similar, if broader vein: “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.”
They also shared concrete features: both were expatriates of sorts from the middle west, she to the eastern establishment, he to Europe and Cuba; but both drew heavily on a pastoral childhood there. Both started out in journalism, and had significant tenures, she as editor for McClure’s for many years, he as a foreign correspondent in Paris for a couple of salad years, but in various riffs thereafter. Both knew they had to cut themselves from journalism for the sake of their art, but both took with them pristine habits which helped significantly to form that art.
Both wrote great (WW I) war novels, A Farewell to Arms, possibly Hemingway’s most read book, and One of Ours, which won Cather the Pulitzer. Both had subordinated themselves when young before dominating, possibly lesbian literary women: Hemingway with Gertrude Stein (and Alice Toklas); Cather with Annie Fields, widow of James Fields of publisher giants Ticknor and Fields. (Her partner was Sarah Orne Jewett in possibly a “Boston marriage,” i.e., Victorian/Edwardian women living/ loving together, but not physical). And both conveyed in much of their work a languid sense of lost time, futility, even despair; while centering it all on a tested-firm moral core, whether in Antonia’s spit, Alexandra’s powerful solitude in O Pioneers!, or Henry Jordan’s universal Spanish mission. Or Santiago’s perseverance in The Old Man and the Sea, or the grandmother in “Old Mrs. Harris,” Cather’s most famous short story. The list is long and consistent and almost always includes the uncertain mix of success and fatal failure: Cantwell in Across the River, the protagonist of The Professor’s House, the Archbishop to whom death comes.
For a brief spell the fatalistic even creeps directly into their titles — Death Comes to the Archbishop, “A Natural History of the Dead,” and Death in the Afternoon all appearing in a five year window framing the start of the Great Depression (1927-32). And death, solitude, disappointment, or tragedy in love mark central themes throughout the work of both.
Of course they were different, he big and brawling and irreverent, hiding his sentiment; she proper and staid and respectful to the point of morally rejecting Oscar Wilde. He cut a dashing figure, a near Adonis in young manhood; a comely picture of her cannot be found.
Each lost painfully in early love: he with nurse Agnes in Milan; she supposedly with an athletic coed, Louise Pound, at the University of Nebraska. He totaled four wives on three continents, she was with her companion, Edith Lewis, for forty years in New York City. Her works are more quiet, and, being a generation earlier, not born in post World War I disaffection. Her plot line is more slow developing, and often cuts across time separations of a decade or more (Pioneers, Lost Lady, Antonia, Archbishop); his often take but a very few days (To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea).
But in the end their deeper similarities should not escape us: each, though differently oriented, knew the darker side. “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.” “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” Her “There . . . nothing . . . no . . . no . . .no . . . there . . . not . . . there . . . nothing . . . not” ends in the future of the land. His blacker “Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada” does not.
But if you were to try to pick the male and female American novelists of that first half of the twentieth century, you would be hard pressed to improve on their unlikely pairing. Richard Edel, the great Henry James scholar (Hadley’s favorite novelist), was surely a bit in his cups when he said, “The time will come when she’ll be ranked above Hemingway.” But it points us to a fuller awareness of her significance.
(Willa Sibert Cather, 1873-1947; Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1899-1961)
Michael Seefeldt served on the board of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park from 1991-2003 in various capacities and was a Professor of Medicine at UIC College of Medicine
This article was first published in the Hemingway Foundation Dispatch Spring 2006