Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather

by Benjamin Taylor

Viking 2023

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Willa Cather famously said as she looked back on the early years of the century. It had been a time of profound transformation in Western societies. The First World War, a deadly pandemic, the increasing influence of industrial capitalism, and the rapid development of new technologies made Cather—and many other people—interpret her world as utterly different from what she had experienced before. In response to the rapid social and cultural shifts, many artists embraced the rallying cry of the era: “Make it new!” While visual artists experimented with abstract imagery and composers explored tonal music, modernist writers relied on fractured plotlines, constructed elaborate structures for their novels, emphasized psychological realism, and wrote with complex narrative techniques including multiple points of view and unreliable observers.

Cather thought of herself as part of the world that had been left behind. Benjamin Taylor, Cather’s newest biographer, suggests that she “grew to hate most of modernity.” She held on to the belief that people could be noble and true and that the world was good, even when popular young authors of the time, including Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, rejected the idea that America was still a land of possibility. Taylor argues that Cather was “the greatest of anti-modernists” because “ideals were what were most real to her.” He chooses to “frame [his] story as driven by Cather’s antagonism to the times in which she lived.”

Cather did not immediately realize that she wanted to write about the promise of America and the nobility of its people. Looking back at her earliest works, she argued that she had written two debut novels. Her first book, published in 1912, had simply been an imitation of the urbane novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Following a conversation with regionalist author Sarah Orne Jewett, Cather shifted her focus to her own postage stamp of native soil. The more time she spent in the American West—“in a country I really did care about,” as Cather said, “and among people who were part of that country”—the more she realized that writing about her own homeland of rural and yet culturally diverse prairie would ground her exploration of the dignity of her characters. It also guaranteed her a permanent place in American letters.

Although Cather continued throughout her life to write about the wondrousness of both her chosen settings and the people who lived in them, Taylor’s insistence that Cather was an anti-modernist—and even her own insistence—seems overstated. In reality, the fracturing Cather saw happen in 1922 seems to have had a profound influence on the novels that came later—a change even Taylor recognizes. In The Lost Lady—her novel published in 1922—Taylor sees the beginning of “an upheaval in Cather’s thinking.” He attributes it to the development of her mature “late style”—a “full creative self-awareness, a new aesthetic from which she would not veer.” What he doesn’t do is link the changes in her style to the continuing development of modernism, even though he claimed it happened in the very year Cather chose as her dividing line.

Of course, she had experimented with modernist ideas even before 1922. She wrote an essay about what made O Pioneers! new: she was writing about the lives of working-class immigrants in Nebraska—not a traditional topic for literature—in a story with neither heroes nor action. In My Antonia, she began experimenting with complex narrative styles. She also followed the era’s Imagist poets by creating simple yet striking images that conveyed emotion—such as Cather’s famous articulation in My Antonia of a plow against the sun. As the years went on, she became more and more interested in creating a “verbal mood,” as she said, “an inexplicable presence of the thing not named [emphasis added], of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it.” Instead of relying on straightforward storytelling, Cather leaves structural gaps in her stories where her readers must surmise what might have happened. She depended instead not on plot per se but on imagery and emotions to give power to her novels.

Taylor’s popular biography does not make room for the kind of subtlety that a serious discussion of Cather’s relationship to modernism would require, even though almost all serious critical work on Cather published in the last few decades considers the question. Likewise, his quips about Cather’s sexuality and her relationships are simplistic compared to the nuanced Cather scholarship that has been published since the 1980s.

Still, this biography has its strengths. First, this book is slim and accessible, perfect for the casual reader just discovering the work of the novelist during this Year of Cather, a year marking both her 150th birthday and the hundredth anniversary of her winning the Pulitzer Prize. Secondly, as Taylor points out, his is the first biography to quote directly from Cather’s letters. Perhaps it was Cather’s desire for privacy that led her to burn a few of her letters and to ask her partner Edith Lewis to destroy some additional correspondence after she died. Nevertheless, thousands of letters still exist, carefully preserved by Cather’s family and by a variety of archives. For many years after the novelist’s death, although her papers were available to biographers and other scholars, her correspondence could not be quoted directly but only paraphrased. A decade ago, almost seventy years after the author’s death, the Cather estate removed the restrictions, published a selection of her letters, and created a digital archive to collect as much additional correspondence as scholars could find. Although Taylor’s biography contains no new revelation or interpretation, his ability to share Cather’s spirited voice gives this biography a joyful immediacy.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.