Copyright © 1993 by the Willa Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663XMemorial and Educational Foundation

Willa Cather Pioneer MemorialNewsletter

VOLUME XXXVII, No. 2Summer, 1993

The Willa Cather Society

Post-Seminar Issue

326 N. Webster StreetRed Cloud, Nebraska 68970

Telephone (402) 746-2653

A highlight of Seminar ’93 was an interview with Cather’s biographer James Woodressconducted by Susan J. Rosowski, who ski/fluffy drew out the wit as weft as significant wisdomof her subject. -- Photo by Bevedy Cooper

A Report on"After the World Broke

in Two," theFifth InternationalCather Seminar

(June 19-26, 1993),Hastings College

Evelyn Harris HailerDoane College

With 1922 as the crucial datein her book-length study of Cather,which provided the 1993 Seminartitle, it was fitting that Merrill Ma-guire Skaggs gave a major addresson literary relations between Catherand Faulkner "Thefts and Conver-sations." Skaggs suggests that

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Willa Cather,J. W. N. Sullivan, andthe Creative Process

Richard C. HarrisMaritime College, SUNYArt and artists -- writers, paint-

ers, scupltors, composers and per-formers -- occupied Willa Cather’sattention and imagination from theoutset of her literary career. Theartistic personality was the subjectof her first published piece of fic-tion, the short story "Peter" in 1892;was often the focus of Cather’sundergraduate literary, dramatic,and music reviews in the NebraskaState Journal and the LincolnCourier in the mid 1890s; and con-tinued to be a major source of in-

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Teaching Willa Catherin Japan

Dalma H. BrunauerClarkson University

"That is happiness:To be dissolved into something

complete and great"

PREAMBLE TO THE TALE

It all began with O Pioneers!The scene was Budapest, Hungary,soon after World War II. I was inmy third year at the University,majoring in English and Hungarian.At long last, it was permissible tovisit the American Legation and useits library. I picked up a slendervolume, designed to fit into theback pocket of a Gl’s uniform. The

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A REPORT ON "AFTER THEWORLD BROKE IN TWO", (Continued)the volley had it swiftest moves in Cather’s penultimatestory, "Before Breakfast," which she had removed herhand brace to write, through allusion after allusion toFaulkner’s work, especially "The Old People" and TheSound and the Fury. While most presentations ad-dressed the later novels, Ann Romines focussed onhow Cather treated old age itself in "Her MortalEnemy’s Daughter: Willa Cather and the Writing ofAge." .Gather grew old at a time of "unprecedenteddisesteem for old age," which continues to forecloseour lives, and she had already observed the onset ofage in members of her family. Romines opens an un-travelled path with her analyses of the characteriza-tions of Myra Henshaw, old Mrs. Harris, who in theWest never sees other old women, and Mrs. Ramsay,the old Western woman in Lucy Gayheart.

What Cather saw before as well as after the worldbroke in two in 1922 was concretized for us in severalsignificant buildings, including "the 30-room George

Elizabeth Ammons, Bruce Baker, and Ann Romines enjoyresponding to their audience. -- Photo by Bevedy Cooper

Cather house" where G. P. Cather grew up and whichSarah Cather Wagner continues to restore. Operahouses provided another architectural dimensionduring the Seminar. Their significance within nine-teenth and early twentieth-century culture was ad-dressed in a slide-illustrated lecture by D. LayneEhlers. The opera house at Bladen was the appropri-ate site of a paper session on One of Ours becausethe body of G. P. Cather, Willa’s cousin and model forClaude Wheeler, was returned there before burial. The1885 Opera House in Red Cloud, where the youngWilla appeared as the Merchant in "Beauty and theBeast" to benefit victims of the Blizzard of 1888 andlater spoke on "Superstition Versus Investigation" ather high school graduation in 1890, is WCPM’s nextrestoration project. After climbing the long flight ofstairs from the main street to this space above Coastto Coast Hardware, we saw the architect’s plans for

the future: auditorium seating, archives, and meetingrooms; but we also saw what was past: vestiges of theold auditorium and the provocative apartment withinportions of the prefabricated house the space con-tains.

Two examples of domestic architecture weresubjects of informed commentary. Willowshade,Cather’s childhood home in Virginia, was discussed byowner Susan Parry, who, with her husband, David, isresto.ring it. The Pavelka farmhouse, which appears inMyAntonia as the end of Jim Burden’s pilgrimage, wasdiscussed by David Murphy, architect, architecturalhistorian, and co-author of the Nomination of CatherSites and Districts in Webster County for the NationalRegister of Historic Places. Seeing the Pavelka farm-house after Murphy’s slide-illustrated presentation, withits emphasis on layered enclosures and nineteenthcentury Bohemian peasant spirituality epitomized bythe centralityr of the kitchen into which crops werebrought, was a revelation. We also learned why thePavelka farmhouse "lacks a front door." In rural Bohe-mia the pattern prevailed of a courtyard with a barn atthe rear; in town, the principal room faced front,oriented to the village square. In rural Nebraska,therefore, the front door of the farmhouse faced thefarmyard, its ancestral model designed to relate to acourtyard of buildings.

The sixth and seventh buildings of significancewere Grace Church in Red Cloud and Saint Mark’sEpiscopal Pro-Cathedral in Hastings. (Judy Hunnekepointed out during the week that Cather was called inon Milmine’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy becauseshe as "a religious person.") While the connection ofCather’s family to the Baptist faith was alluded to inseveral papers, we also heard about Willa’s sympathywith liturgy and her 1922 conversion to the Episcopalchurch. We visited Grace Church, where Cather wasconfirmed with her parents, and saw its window of theGood Shepherd, dedicated to Charles Cather andrecalling Willa’s early memories of him and the sheephe raised in Virginia. Members of the Seminarattended a Eucharistic liturgy at the Hastings Cathedralof Cather’s.friend, George Allen Beecher, EpiscopalBishop of Western Nebraska from 1910 to 1943, whoconfirmed Cather and with whom she corresponded.Steve Shively spoke from the pulpit on "Cather and theEpiscopal Church: The Sacramental Sacrifice." TheGothic structure itself is significant, for it was designedby Ralph Adams Cram of Boston, an associate ofBertram Goodhue, architect of the Nebraska StateCapitol.

While these buildings remain to be juxtaposedwith what we already know to enlarge our perspective,new readings serve to make the old texts new or atleast renew our understanding of them. John Murphy’scommentary on "The Modernist Conversion of Cather’sProfessor" was framed by William James’s discussionof "the sick soul" and paralleled with slides of ReneMagritte’s paintings to illustrate how Professor St.Peter begins the transformation from petrification

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toward the sainthood o.f his apostle namesake. Anotherreading of particular acuity was Karl R. Rosenquist’s"Seeking the One True Chumh Because the WorldBroke in Two." Rosenquist regards Cather as "Amer-ica’s high priest of art" -- rather than merely repeatAnglo-Catholic literary traditions (those of Pater andNew-man), Cather chooses to indoctrinate aesthetictheories on American terrain. "The result is ’back-wards’-Iooking on two counts: Cather locates in theAmerican past the sort of plain faith she values; aswell, her sanctification of same-sex community inDeath Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on theRock springs from earlier, non-American traditions."

True to Cather’s enjoyment of the pleasures of thetable, Mark and Frankie Warner designed and pre-pared two remarkable meals. The first, a candlelitVictorian banquet in the gymnasium of the elementaryschool, made a dramatic change after a hot day on theprairie and the streets of Red Cloud. Six coursesbegan with a superb cream of brie and leek soup andcontinued with cold salmon and cucumber. A raspberrysorbet intervened to cleanse the palate and wasfollowed by beef Wellington. Gingerbread cake layeredwith verbena mousse served with berries concludedthe memorable feast. Another evening we enjoyed theepitome of an outdoor meal at the Burlington Station.Sausages, cheeses, and ratatouille were served withwheat beer and followed by Marshall Christensensinging and leading songs of the first world war. Hisaccompanist, Darin Stringer, had played dinner musicduring the Victorian banquet and also sang somechallenging operatic arias. Darin’s musical training willcontinue at George Washington University in the fall,and he promises to sing for us at the Sixth CatherSeminar in Canada.

Another pleasure for Cather -- the theatre m wasprovided by the Seminar Players assembled by co-director Robert Thacker for the world premiere of "TheWestbound Train," which Cather published as "A ThirtyMinute Sketch for Two People" in 1899. Our version,deconstructed by co-director Linda Hughson Ross,featured a cast of nine with a post-performanceevaluation by Linda as Willa Cather herself in theSteichen portrait middy blouse and a flowered hat.Sybil Johnston, the young bride, apprehensive lest herhandsome husband’s reputation as a ladies’ man wascontinuing after their marriage, multiplied into SybilsThree: an agitated and addlepated one played byKaren Kebarle, an imperious one played by EvelynHarris Hailer, and a nubile one interpreted by HeidiRaber. The actors’ multifaceted talents were plumbed:Bill Christensen, for example, provided both music anda train whistle through his virtuosic harmonica playingin addition to his role as Messenger Boy. Mark Madi-gan, handsomely attired in black and white with brightmetallic accents, took the role of the harassed StationAgent. Helen Levy was the woman in the stationwhose role lifted lines out of Sybil’s monologue worthyof what George Eliot summarized as "The World’sWife," while Donna Kortje and Margaret McFadden

provided voices for the letters Sybil reads. Alan Wilkin-son from the University of Hull supplied English wit asReginald Johnston, the befuddled husband of thedesperate Sybil. Not to be forgotten was "Bijou," asmall stuffed white dog whose transfer signified whichSybil was coming to the fore. ("Bijou" is going toEngland with Alan in recognition for his having jour-neyed farthest to act in the Cather production.) Embroi-dering on Cather’s lines, Reggie/Alan, in his joy atbeing reunited with his wife, offered to kiss "Bijouhere," if he "could figure out which end to kiss."

Alan had already been introduced on a panelexamining cross cultural connections. He spoke ofteaching Cather at the University of Hull, while DalmaHunyadi Brunauer, author of perhaps the earliestCather dissertation, spoke of teaching Cather in Japan,and Laxmi Parasuram of the University of Burdwanshared her experiences in West Bengal. Two otherpanels on teaching included public and private highschool experiences as well as highlights from a NEHSeminar on Cather and Edith Wharton led by JanetSharistanian at the University of Kansas.

Willa Cather’s love of music was addressed inseveral papers. Richard Harris discussed the Sullivanbiography of Beethoven Cather had read to illuminethe emotional darkness of the artist in "Lucy Gayheartand the Question of Suffering." Jerry Dollar examinedthe influence of "the darker, more tragic and elegiacWagner" of "The Twilight of the Gods" in insightfulcommentary on, among others, Captain Forrester andIvy Peters.

Cather’s perspective on her world m why shechose to name and describe its cataclysmic break --was a recurring subject both in plenary as well aspanel sessions. Related issues of multi-culturalismwere addressed by Elizabeth Ammons, who spoke ofCather’s "love of Empire" with its "hegemonic whitepatriarchal control" and raised an intriguing point aboutGabrielle Longstreet, "the old beauty," who, as a youngbeauty from Barbados, configured Empire:"a colonizedsubject who loves her colonization." Cynthia GriffinWolff cast a wide net in "Time and Memory in Sapphiraand the S/ave Gir/: Sex, Abuse, and Art," as shecommented on the very young Willa cautioning apredatory judge who was stroking her curls: "l’se adang’ous nigger, I is." To Wolff, Cather observedSarah Orne Jewett’s insight that "the thing that teasesthe mind over and over for years, and at last gets itselfput down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, itbelongs to Literature" -- by synthesizing the Demeterand Persephone myth with her recollections of thereunion o!~ Nancy with her mother, Till, after a quarterof a century and also the child observer and rebel shewas herself. Here are intimations of an "untellable"tale, perhaps of abuse.

The Fifth International Seminar leaves us withmuch to ponder as we return to Cather’s texts.

More on Seminar19-

Sleeping in Nebraska:Additional Seminar Reflections

Merrill Maguire SkaggsDrew University

During the Fifth International Cather Seminar,participants were treated to two perfect days of touringthe prairie and sites featured in Willa Cather’s fiction.As one of the lucky tourists, I saw for the first time thehouse in Bladen which G. P. Cather, the prototype forClaude Wheeler, built for his wife Myrtle (Enid). Oncue, as we stared, one seminarian produced a copy ofOne of Ours and read this description from Cather’snovel:

After the workmen had gone, Claude took thegirls upstairs by the ladder. They emerged from alittle entry into a large room which extended overboth the front and back parlours. The carpenterscalled it "the pool hall." There were two longwindows, like doors, opening upon the porch roof,and in the sloping ceiling were two dOrmer win-dows, one looking north to the timber claim andthe other south toward Lovely Creek. Gladys atonce felt a singular pleasantness about thischamber, empty and unplastered as it was. "Whata lovely room!" she exclaimed.

Claude took her up eagerly. "Don’t you thinkso? You see it’s my idea to have the second floorfor ourselves, instead of cutting it up into littleboxes as people usually do. We can come uphere and forget the farm and the kitchen and allour troubles. I’ve made a big closet for each of us,and got everything just right. And now Enid wantsto keep this room for preachers!"

Enid laughed .... "1 don’t think we ought totake the best room for ourselves."

"Why not?" Claude argued hotly. "I’m buildingthe whole house for ourselves. Come out on theporch roof, Gladys. Isn’t this fine for hot nights? Iwant to put a railing round and make this into abalcony, where we can have chairs and a ham-mock." (153)

G. P. Cather House in Bladen. -- Photo by Joyco McDonald

On the next page, Claude stresses his sleeping porch:"If I make this into a balcony," Claude mur-

mured, "the peak of the roof will always throw ashadow over it in the afternoon, and at night thestars will be right overhead. It will be a fine placeto sleep in harvest time."

"Oh, you could always come up here to sleepon a hot night," Enid said quickly.

"It wouldn’t be the same."

Because we were hearing Cather’s words as welooked at the house, some of us began futilely circlingit to find Claude’s sleeping porch. The porch, however,did not appear until we stood before the house ofGeorge Cather, G. Po Cather’s father. There it satabove the front entrance and triggered this note.

I have previously argued (After the World Broke inTwo 33-44) that Cather’s unceasing willingness toexperiment led her, in One of Ours, to write a Freudiannovel. It seems to me that in a Freudian novel trans-porting a sleeping porch for hot nights from a parents’

George Cather House in the Country. - Photo by Joyce McDonald

house to a son’s makes an extremely potent symbol.But as Jo Ann Middleton replied when I reported to heron the seminar, "Yes, but One of Ours could be readin toto as a novel about where Claude sleeps -- fromthe first sentence to the last." I believe almost asarticles of faith that Willa Cather made no unconsciousmistakes in the details of her novel and that she hadwonderful eye-hand coordination in describing architec-ture. Suspecting, therefore, that she chose herchanges in G. P. Cather’s house, I noted other inter-esting disparities.

First, the house is not located "on the level stretchbeside his father’s timber claim because, when he wasa little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the mostbeautiful spot in the world" (150). Rather, it is acrossthe street from his bride Myrtle’s childhood home, inthe middle of Bladen and a block from the opera houseto which Lieutenant Cather’s body was carried for ahometown funeral. That is, Claude Wheeler tried tofind a "natural" setting, where he and his bride couldbegin housekeeping alone, as G. P. Cather did not.This difference, as others, heightens the novel’s ironiesabout Claude Wheeler’s disappointing marriage.Further, according to the present owner who talked tous at length from her front porch, the house is not builton an exceptionally deep cellar to reflect Claude’sconviction that "the deeper a cellar was, the better itwas" (150). Claude’s futile hopes for a "lucky founda-

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tion" were his own, not G. P. Cather’s. Claude alsoplans one large and airy room with two dormer win-dows and large closets for his second floor. That is,with deep basement and large closets, fictional Claudehas the space which he, not his prototype, needed tostore his discards and secrets. G. P. Cather’s house,we were. told, has predictably two upstairs bedrooms,each with two dormer windows and normal closets.The resulting lines of G. P. Cather’s house with noupstairs sleeping porch, however, provide the mostinteresting discrepancy between Cather’s constructionand the house her cousin built. I, at least, thought G.P. Cather’s house was architecturally the prettiest andmost interesting cottage I saw in Nebraska. Theexceptional roof line and four balanced dormers giveit a vaguely Asian look, characterized by exceptionallyinteresting and active lines no matter what angle youview it from. In short, this house is far too visuallypleasing and singular for Claude Wheeler, as Catherportrayed him, to imagine. Claude is still a "greencountry boy" (30) when he goes to his death in Franceat age 25. G. P. Cather’s dates on his gravestonereminded us later that day that he was a mature manof 35 when he died in the war.

I think all Cather scholars have been entirely rightin asserting that the correspondences between Cathersites and Cather fictions are profoundly important.When the correspondences seem exact m as thedescriptions of the childhood home in "Old Mrs. Harris"seem their synchronicity tells us that the fictionwriter is talking about her own life as she has experi-enced it. Any discrepancy, however, will tell us asmuch as exact description. For example, that samechildhood home is described without the servant’salcove one passes on the way to Thea’s attic room, inThe Song of the Lark, because Cather doesn’t needthat servant in the house in that novel. Thea’s room, infact, when we saw it, was hotter than Hades andimpossible to imagine sleeping in at all. But Catherwas, after all, a writer of fictions, who followed, firstand foremost, Thoreau’s injunction, "Sim plify, simplify!"If the simplifications involved splicing father’s and son’shouses together and moving one back into the country,she did not hesitate.

As this note’s last comment, I suggest that whenyou visit Nebraska some June to check out all this,you’d do well to remember as I did not that her de-scriptions of the weather have been simplified andfictionalized too. Take a blanket.

WORKS CITEDCather, Willa. One of Ours. New York: Knopf, 1922.Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. After the World Broke in Two: The

Later Novels of Wil/a Cather. Charlottesville: UP ofVirginia, 1990.

¯., THE CREATIVE PROCESS(Continued)

terest throughout her career, most notably in thestories collected in Youth and the Bright Medusa(1920) and in her novels The Song of the Lark (1915)and Lucy Gayheart (1935). Because of Cather’slifelong fascination with the creative process and theartistic personality, a comment in one of her letters toDorothy Canfield Fisher (Dorothy Canfield FisherCollection, Univ. of Vermont-Burlington) is particularlyinteresting. In this undated letter to Fisher, Catherinquired as to whether Fisher had read J. W. N.Sullivan’s Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. Forgoodness sake, Cather declared, read it! Sullivan’sbook, Cather suggests, is the only book she ever readthat represents any real, detailed thinking about andanalysis of the artistic personality and artistic creativity.She adds that Sullivan evidently was a scientist andthat is perhaps the reason he wrote so well about art.(In deference to testamentary prohibitions and thepolicy of the University of Vermont concerning Cather’sletters, I have paraphrased Cather’s comments.)

That Cather should have read Sullivan’s biogra-phy of Beethoven is not surprising in the least. Shehad early on (despite her refusal to take piano lessons)developed a great love of music, which she came tobelieve was the most evocative and sublime of all artforms. As Joseph Brennan remarked many years ago,"Cather responded to no other art m not even litera-ture ~ so deeply as she did to [music]" (175). "Morethan any other novelist in American literature, possiblymore than any other major novelist in English, shebrought a deep love and knowledge and understand-ing of music to bear upon her art" (263-64). Moreover,Cather had long admired the music of Beethoven,having called him, as early as 1895, "the Shakespeareof music" ("Too Much Mendelssohn" 178), and addingin the unpublished fragment "Light on Adobe Walls,"which first appeared in 1949, that Beethoven was oneof the "very great artists," like Tolstoy and Leonardo,who had "outgrown art," who was "bigger than thegame" (125). As she had grown older, Cather’s earlierinterest in the drama and spectacle of grand operahad given way to the intimacy of the Schubert liederand the Beethoven quartets. Thus while Cather’sinterest in a book on Beethoven is understandable, herhigh praise for Sul/ivan’s book bears some comment.What, exactly, about Sullivan’s book caused Cather tosee it as the most significant book about "art" that shehad ever read? What, in particular, struck her inSullivan’s analysis of the creative spirit and proc-ess?

Before I attempt to answer these questions, let memention a few facts about Sullivan himself. JohnWilliam Navin Sullivan (1886-1937) was born inLondon, the son of a Protestant mission official and awoman of notable musical talent. He obtained a verysolid education in mathematics and the physicalsciences, became a free-lance scientific writer, served

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in the ambulance corps in Wodd War I, found agovernment post under John Middleton Murray, and bythe end of the war was contributing to several highlyrespected British journals. According to the writers ofTwentieth Century Authors, Sullivan’s novel, AnAttempt at Life (1917), "showed that his vocation wasnot the writing of fiction" (1371). Aspects of Science, acollection of essays on science and mathematicspublished in 1923, was, however, a great success.Other works included Atoms and Electrons (1924),Three Men Discuss Relativity (1926), The Bases ofModern Science (1928), and Science: A New Outlook(1935). Cather’s comment to Fisher that she believedSullivan was a scientist was certainly correct. A mea-sure of his reputation is the frequent mention ofSullivan in connection with Bertrand Russell. TheLiterary Review, for example, commented, at thepublication of Aspects of Science: Second Series in1927, "If Bertrand Russell be excepted, I know of nofiner interpreter of mathematics and the physicalsciences" than J. W. N. Sullivan. None other thanEdmund Wilson declared that "with the exception ofBertrand Russell, [Sullivan] is probably, from theliterary point of view, the most accomplished andbrilliant popularizer of modem scientific theory" (280).

Given his background and previous work, it mightseem rather odd that Sullivan would have written abook on the spiritual development of Beethoven. Hisdoing so, however, seems to have been only anotherof his many attempts to make complex or esotericideas understandable for the layperson. Beethoven:His Spiritual Development, published in 1927 inEngland by Jonathan Cape and in the United States byAlfred A. Knopf, Cather’s own publisher, is divided intotwo major sections, the first titled "The Nature ofMusic" and the second, "Beethoven’s Spiritual Devel-opment." In his preface Sullivan argues that in hismusic Beethoven "was primarily concerned to expresshis personal vision of life," a vision that was, of course,"the product of his character and experience" (vii)."The highest function of music," according to Sullivan,"is to express the musician’s experience and hisorganization of it" (24). Sullivan strongly believed thatscientific ideas were important to general humanneeds, and his book on Beethoven has been called"an attempt to assert the claim of music -- as of theother arts -- to have a bearing on reality no lesssignificant than that of science" (Twentieth CenturyAuthors 1371-72). "Art must rank with science andphilosophy," Sullivan says in Beethoven, "as a way ofcommunicating knowledge about reality" (5).

Cather’s theories of art, from her earliest reviewsin the 1890s, suggest the same emphasis on art asexpression. Speaking of the writing process in aNebraska State Journal article in March of 1896,Cather remarked, "Great thoughts are not uncommonthings, they are the property of the multitude. Greatemotions even are not so rare, they belong to youthand strength the wodd over. Art is not thought oremotion, but expression, expression, always expres-

sion" ("A Mighty Craft" 417). In an often noted passagein The Song of the Lark (1915), Thea Kronborg, whowill go on to triumph on the stage of the MetropolitanOpera, discovers some Indian pottery and realizes inthe culture of the Southwestern Cliff Dwellers animportant link to her own psychological roots. In herrecent interpretation of the passage, Demaree Peckargues that this realization, rather than a discovery ofthe desire for something beyond the self, indicatesThea’s desire, "as always, to locate that ’somethingwithin herself’ and where it came from" (Peck 30). Ifthe pottery is a metaphor for art -- "The stream andthe broken pottery: what was art but an effort to makea sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a momentthe shining, elusive element which is life itself" (SL304) -- it is properly seen, Peck argues, as the form"that art provides for the artist’s inner stream of vitality"(30). Art, Cather was convinced, had to begin with that"something" within oneself. When Thea declares that"no singing teacher can give anybody what I got downthere" (463), she ultimately refers, Peck says, "to thedepths of her own psyche" (31). Cather’s declarationon the subject of artistic passion in her 1924 article onDefoe’s Roxanna seems to sum up her attitude verywell: "When a writer has a strong or revelatory experi-ence with his characters, he unconsciously creates ascene; gets a depth of picture, and writes, as it were,in three dimensions instead of two. The absence ofthese warm and satisfying moments in any work offiction is final proof of the author’s poverty of emotionand lack of imagination" (80).

A second of Sullivan’s points with which Catherwould have agreed concerns the artist’s experienceand use of that experience in the process of artisticcreation. While Sullivan says that the "life work of agreat artist is not some kind of sumptuous diary," heasserts that Beethoven’s attitude towards life "wasconditioned by certain root experiences" (viii). Sulli-van’s subsequent description of the relationship ofthese "root experiences" to artistic creation might applyto many creative artists; however, it certainly musthave struck Willa Cather as an especially accuratedescription "of her own creative process. According toSullivan,

Numberless experiences extending over severalyears are gradually co-ordinated in the uncon-scious mind of the artist, and the total syntheticwhole finds expression, it may be, on someparticular occasion. Even with poetry, which oftenprofesses to have its origin in some particularoccasion, the poem is never the effect of theparticular occasion acting on some sort of tabularasa. The experience of the particular occasionfinds its place within a context, although theimpact of the experience may have been neces-sary to bring this context to the surface. (85)

The particular occasion that prompts the syntheticexpression of the whole, or the external occasion thatelicits the artistic expression, is, Sullivan says, "nevermore than what psychologists call a ’tripper’ incident,

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releasing energies and contexts that have been formedin entire independence of it" (94).

Certainly many of Willa Cather’s comments on herown works suggest that this same process was at theheart of her artistic expression. As she remarked in"The Best Stories of Sarah Ome Jewett," if the artistachieves anything noble or enduring, it must be by"giving himself absolutely to his material" through the"gift of sympathy." "The artist spends a lifetime inloving the things that haunt him, in having his mind’teased’ by them..." (51). in order for those thingsthat "teased" Cather to become art, some type ofcatalytic experience or, to use Cather’s own term,"explosion" (Sullivan’s "tripper") had to take place.These incidents were commonplace in Cather’s artisticexperience. One only need read Cather’s accounts ofOlive Fremstad’s astonishing 1913 performance as alast-minute replacement at the Metropolitan Opera,which inspired The Song of the Lark; her visit withAnnie Pavelka, which inspired My ~ntonia; and herreading the obituary of Lyra Garber, the prototype forMarian Forrester of A Lost Lady, to realize the extentto which long-stored memories and feelings, triggeredby a particular event, came together in explosivecreative experiences for Wilta Cather.

A third point on which Cather would have agreedwith Sullivan concerns the individual’s role in trans-forming the emotional and experiential into the artistic.She would never deny the pdmary importance of"soul," passion, or the "gift of sympathy." Cather had,however, come to realize quite early in her career asa writer of fiction that, as Robert Frost would say, theart of fiction involves much more than writing "hugeshapeless novels" and pouring "huge gobs of rawsincerity" upon the page (106). According to Sullivan,"The greatest function of a work of art is to present uswith a higher organization of experience" (165). In her1925 essay on Sarah Ome Jewett, Cather remarked,"The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things thathaunt him, in having his mind ’teased’ by them, intrying to get these conceptions down on paper exactlyas they are to him and not in conventional posessupposed to reveal their character; trying this methodand that, as a painter tries different lightings anddifferent attitudes with his subject to catch the one thatpresents it more suggestively than any other" (51)."The shapes and scenes that have ’teased’ the mindfor years," Cather added, "when they at last do getthemselves rightly put down, make a very much higherorder of writing, and a much more costly, than themost vivid and vigorous transfer of immediate impres-sions" (48). Passion, expression, synthesis, andarrangement -- these are the characteristics Sullivansees as essential to artistic creation. A genius, heasserts, may be defined as one "who is exceptionallyrich in recoverable contexts" (85), a phrase that seemsto apply perfectly to Cather. An artist may experiencemore, know more, or be sensitive to more than thecommon man, but ultimately his genius, according toSullivan, is the result of his =superior organization of

his experiences and perceptions" (85). As Cather toldFlora Merrill of the New York World in 1925, "Yourmemories are like the colors in paints, but you mustarrange them" (77).

Finally, Sullivan contends that Beethoven was "afirm believer" in what I. A. Richards, in Principles ofLiterary Criticism, called the "revelation theory" of art,the idea that art can evoke or convey importantintimations or truths. "The highest art," Sullivan con-tends, thus has "a transcendental function" (16). "Thefeeling we indisputably have, from a great work of art,"is that "a large area of experience has been illuminatedand harmonized for us..." (10). While there are manypassages in Cather’s writing that suggest the impor-tance of this idea, Lucy Gayheart’s response to hear-ing Clement Sebastian sing one of the Schubert songsis typical: "That was the feeling. Lucy had never heardanything sung with such elevation of style. In its calm-ness and serenity there was a kind of enlargement,like daybreak" (29-30).

Willa Cather maintained a lifelong interest in artand artists, the artistic personality and artistic creativity.In her fiction, she wrote almost exclusively aboutperformers and admirers instead of creators. ("TheSculptor’s Funeral," first published in McClure’s in1905, is, perhaps, the most notable exception.) How-ever, in various essays collected in The Kingdom ofArt, The World and the Parish, in Willa Cather onWriting, and in interviews reprinted in Willa Cather inPerson, we have a valuable record of Cather’s opin-ions on art and artistic creation. Cather’s letter toDorothy Canfield Fisher praising J. W. N. Sullivan’sBeethoven: His Spiritual Development is, I believe,another important document for any Cather scholar, forit points us to a very significant commentary on art, notCather’s own, but a detailed analysis of the artisticprocess that, as she said, "thinks" -- and that invitesthe reader to think m about art.

Why was Cather so interested in Sullivan’s book?Perhaps because he expressed many views about artand artistic creation so similar to her own. Why wasshe so impressed with his book? Perhaps because, asa scientist,. Sullivan was able to write about art from adifferent perspective than that of an artist, and prob-ably because he was a master, in both his scientificworks and in his book on Beethoven, at explainingcomplex ideas in the most admirably lucid terms.Cather asked Fisher, Have you read Sullivan’s book onBeethoven? For goodness sakes do! One might askCather scholars, Have you read Sullivan’s book onBeethoven? For goodness sakes, do!

WORKS CITED

Brennan, Joseph. "Music and Willa Cather." UniversityReview 31 (1965): 257-64.

Cather, Willa. ’q’oo Much Mendelssohn." The World and theParish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902.Ed. William W. Curtin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970.176-178.

Cather, Willa. "The Best Stories of,Sarah Ome Jewett." Wi//aCather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as~ an Art.With a Foreword by Stephen Tennant. New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1949. 47-59.

...... . "DeFoe’s The Fortunate Mistress." Willa Cather onWriting: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. With aForeword by Stephen Tennant. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1949. 75-88.

..... .. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Undated. DorothyCanfield Fisher File. University of Vermont-Burlington.

..... . "Light on Adobe Walls." Willa Cather on Writing: Critica/Studies on Writing as an Art. With a Foreword byStephen Tennant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.123-26.

..... . Lucy Gayheart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.

..... . "A Mighty Craft." The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’sFirst Principles and Cdtical Statements, 1893-1896. Ed.Bernice Slote. U of Nebraska P, 1966. 415-17.

..... . The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.Frost, Robert. "Letter to the Amherst Student." Selected

Prose of Robert Frost. Ed. Hyde Cox and EdwardConnery Lathem. New York: Collier, 1968. 105-107.

Merrill, Flora. "A Short Story Course Can Only Delay, ItCannot Kill an Artist." Willa Cather in Person: Inter-views, Speeches, and Letters. Ed. L. Brent Bohlke.Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.73-80.

Peck, Demaree. "Thea Kronborg’s ’Song of Myself’: TheArtist’s Imaginative Inheritance in The Song of theLark." Western Amedcan Literature 26 (1991): 21-37.

Rev. of Aspects of Science: Second Series. New York Eve-ning Post Literary Review. 15 Jan. 1927: 7.

Sullivan, J. W. N. Beethoven: His Spiritual Development.1927. New York: Vintage, 1960.

"Sullivan, John William Navin." Twentieth Century Authors: ABiographical Dictionary of Modem Literature. Ed.Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycroft. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942. 1371-72.

Wilson, Edmund. "A Humanist of Science." Rev. of Aspectsof Science: Second Series. New Republic 49 (1927):280.

TEACHING WILLA CATHER IN JAPAN(Continued)

cover was garish, giving no indication of the treasurethat was within. It was love at first sight. I was in anintensely religious period of my life, and I felt that thescenes in which Alexandra was carried in the arms ofher strong dream-lover were the closest things inmodern literature to the mystical experiences of SaintTeresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. Thatexplanation, to this day, satisfies me more than anyother. When the time came to choose a topic for myMaster’s thesis, even though I was strongly drawn toThornton Wilder also, I was enough of a feminist todecide in favor of Cather. As it turned out, I was thefirst person at a Hungarian university to write a thesison an American author. (It was not until much later thatI heard that I might have been the first person any-where to write a Master’s thesis on Willa Cather.)

It certainly was not easy to find material for myintended thesis. Hungarian publishing houses hadalways been eager to publish Western works, and

some of Cather’s books had already appeared inHungarian translation: Death Comes for the Arch-bishop (Az aranyszinu dom, tr. K. Pogany), Shadowson the Rock (Arnyekok a sziklan, tr. !. Boldizsar),Sapphira and the S/ave Gift (A felver, tr. L. Ken]), aswell as the short story "Paul’s Case" (Pal, tr. L. Cs.Szabo). Diligent searching also led me to the Tauch-nitz Editions of Death Comes for the Archbishop,Shadows on the Rock, My ,~ntonia, and Lucy Gay-heart. Anthologies yielded a few short stories inEnglish: "The Sculptor’s Funeral," "A Wagner Matinee,"and "Paul’s Case"; I found the essay "Nebraska" espe-cially helpful and continued with great eagernesssearching for more. Where I ran into a blank wall,however, was in the area of secondary sources. It wasyears before I realized that there was almost nothingyet written about Cather. (In 1946-47 Rapin’s slender1930 volume was unavailable in Hungary.) My apprais-al of her work had to be based almost exclusively onmy own analysis and insights. Even so, I completedmy Master’s thesis early in 1947, submitted it to theUniversity, and bravely sent.off a copy to Miss WillaCather, New York City. I don’t know whether she everreceived it, for she died that spring, The following year,I expanded my work into a Ph.D. dissertation (inHungarian) and submitted that also. By that time, I wasteaching English, Hungarian, and Latin in a secondaryschool. The political situation was bad, however, andin March of 1949 I made an adventurous escape fromHungary into Austria through the newly erected IronCurtain. While in Austria I found out that Willa Catherhad died and some American agency was sponsoringan essay contest on her work. I submitted an essay (inGerman) but never heard from the sponsors. Later thatyear, I was admitted to the United States and beganmy long career of teaching American and World Liter-ature.

You all know how difficult it is in the United Statesto get an opportunity to teach a course in a singleauthor. The opportunity was rarer then, and I had tosmuggle individual works of Cather into courses suchas Introduction to Fiction, American Literature Survey,and Major.American Authors. Cather herself made thesituation especially difficult by her testamentary restric-tions m no cheap editions, no anthologies. It wasyears before those difficulties could be overcome andone could require students to buy one or more Catherworks in affordable editions. A turning point wasreached with the approach of the centennial of herbirth. I was very active at the time in the ModernLanguage Association, giving papers and organizingsessions even] year, and it was the most natural thingfor me to propose a Special Session on Willa Catherfor the 1973 meeting. The organizers wrote back thatthey had a similar suggestion from a Vancouverscholar by the name of David Stouck and that perhapsthe two of us could join forces. And so began abeautiful friendship. Soon after, I heard from BerniceSlote and Virginia Faulkner, inviting me to the Inter-national Centennial Cather Seminar to be held in

November in Nebraska. There I met practically everymajor Cather scholar, and with some of them I wasable to stay in touch and collaborate for years. Withthem, I felt, I was able "to share the precious, theincommunicable past." Several papers resulted, deal-ing with aspects of A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy’sMyra Henshawe, and O Pioneers! But the mostenduring sequel to the Seminar concerned Hiroko Satoof the Tokyo Women’s Christian University~ Her paper,"Willa Cather in Japan," prompted me to comparecertain aspects of Cather’s work to those of the greatJapanese novelist Murasaki Shikibu in a paper, "TheWoman Writer in a Changing Society." In 1977, I wasinvited to be Visiting Scholar at Tokyo Women’sChristian University and presented that paper there;during the same year, I had occasion to present itagain in New Delhi and Budapest, and in followingyears at the University of the Provence as well as inCanada and the United States. It involved an analysisof Murasaki, Cather, and the Hungarian author MargitKaffka. Among Cather’s works, after a sweeping over-view, I focused on attitudes toward societal change inthe late story "The Old Beauty," pointing out theheroine’s astonishing rejuvenation in death as aneternal feminine mystery.

THE TALEIn 1989, I was awarded a Fulbright Professorship

to Japan. I arrived in Tokyo in Mamh of 1990 andspent the academic year 1990-91 in Fukuoka. TheJapan-U.S. Educational Commission assigned me to astate (formerly Imperial) university, Kyushu University,and a private institution, Seinan Gakuin University. Ayear later, I was invited to be Visiting Professor ofLiterature at a municipal institution, Kitakyushu Univer-sity, or Kitakyudai. I started teaching in Kitakyushu inSeptember of 1991 and returned home in September1992. Altogether I spent four semesters in Japan atthree different universities. After a teaching career offour decades, for the first time in my life I was com-pletely free to choose what aspect of American (and,at Kitakyudai also British) literature I wanted to teach!At long last, I taught not one but four complete courseson Willa Cather (and some others on Wilder, Fitz-gerald, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde). Of course, therehad to be a fly in the ointment. After I submitted myfirst, very ambitious course outlines to be put into thecatalog, I was very courteously and apologeticallyrequested to reduce the amount of reading matterbecause Japanese students were not accustomed tomuch assigned outside reading. It was establishedthat about thirty pages each time would the limit --thirty pages a week! Also, I was informed thatJapanese students are used to being lectured at, andnot in the habit of either asking or answering ques-tions. Will they understand English? I asked. I was toldthat some of them will. What .will the others get out ofattending the class? Well, they will be exposed to theEnglish language and may learn something aboutAmerican teaching methods. I was assured, however,

that they were used to following instructions conscien-tiously and would be a pleasure to be around. Duringthe months of preparation for the trip I had to re-thinkand re-plan everything many times, and now, once Iwas there, I had to re-think and re-plan again .-- andagain.

What was I able to cover in the Cather courses?During the first semester of the first year I had to givean overview of Cather’s work, but I didn’t start withthat. I used the teaching system I was taught at theUniversity of Budapest -- the way literature was taughtin every school in Hungary in my day. I started byhanding out copies of a selected story, "Peter," ex-plaining terms and. concepts the students may nothave been familiar with, such as homesteading anddugouts. I warned them that I would be asking for anemotional response: "How did it make you feel?" ThenI read the story out loud. To the question "How did itmake you feel?", there was at first no answer. Incontrast to Hungarian students, who are trained to lookfor an emotional response in themselves, no Americanor Japanese student of mine could ever answer thatquestion the first time. They need help: "Did it makeyou feel happy? Sad? Angry? Surprised?" And then,the big question: "Why? Show me the passage whichmade you feel that way!" We went through the stan-dard analysis: What is Peter like m sensitive, sincerelypious, considerate toward women and children, but animpractical dreamer, an inefficient farme~ What aboutAntone m bully, disrespectful towards his father,without religious sensibilities, but a hard worker?. Arethey the only people in the story? This led them to thesinister force in the background: the "people," the"they" who say that Antone is "a better man than hisfather." What are their criteria? Do you agree? Natural-ly, there are no two classes in which these questionscome in the same order, but before the class is overthe students ought to be aware that the authorial voiceplays tricks with them and that Antone is wickedwhereas Peter is just human. This leads us to theimportant concept of irony -- when the author saysone thing but means another. There is the neat touchof anticlimax:Peter fears the devil, but he fears Antoneeven more.

There is more to the story, of course, and wewent through the concepts of plot and theme as wellas atmosphere, but not all at once. The one thing Ialways tried to fit in during the first class was thebombshell announcement that this really very cleverstory was written by a girl of eighteen -- a girl theirage! And this always gave me a chance to talk aboutCather, who she was, where she lived, and how thepublication of this story (behind her back, by a sneakyprofessor) led her to become a writer. A brief demon-stration on the American map showed her odysseyfrom verdant Virginia to the shockingly different Ne-braskan prairie. A week or two later,. I showed themthe educational film Wi//a Cather’s America, which,even with its flaws (not many, just a few), helped fixlasting images in their minds. And then I told them my

-25-

theory of the genesis of stories. I developed this on thebasis of some of my own writing, but "Peter" is as cleara proof as one could wish for. The theory is thatplants, animals, people usually are conceived by thecoming together of two separate forces, let’s call themmale and female. One, the ovum, waits in readiness;the other, the sperm, arrives swiftly, decisively. Whenthey get together, something starts to grow. In thecase of "Peter," there was the Czech immigrant’ssuicide, one of Cather’s first memories of her new lifeon the praide. For nine years, it lay dormant in hermind. Then, one night she saw Sarah Bernhard inSardou’s play Tosca, and was stirred to the depths. Inthe mysterious fashion which we are pleased to callgenius, the two factors merged, and the young womanbegan to fantasize. What kind of an impression woulda performance like this have on a musician sitting inthe orchestra? What kind of a memory would survivein the mind of that musician in that bleakest of environ-ments, a cruel Nebraska winter? What would thatmusician’s reaction be to the merciless taunts of hisunfeeling son? What kind of a resolution could therebe to that kind of a conflict?

If possible, the teacher, the educator tries toeducate, that is, to draw out all this by questions. InJapan, where the Socratic method is all but unknown,teaching by questions and answers must be fought forpatiently and at times despairingly, but it must bedone; otherwise the students are no better off thanwith their normal by-rote methods. Again and again,one must insist that students learn to answer ques-tions. A.s for that higher aim, that they must alsoquestion the answers, we must wait for Utopia. Therewas a little puzzlement in my mind that these studentsdid not seem as shocked by the suicide as I hadexpected them to be. When we finished discussing"Peter" according to the above method, I read it alouda second time, to tie it all together and bring out thefull impact. And then, seeing that something was stilllacking in the area of "emotional response," I began toprobe until I finally understood that suicide has acompletely different aura in the Japanese mind than inthe Western tradition. Suicide is tied up with honor;seppuku, known by its vulgar name hara-kiri, is not thecoward’s way in Japan but the hero’s. Its other face isromantic, and the story of Romeo and Juliet, to theJapanese mind, is not tragic but tender and noble. So,by the time I got to the suicide of Papa Shimerda inMy ,~ntonia, ! made a special effort to explain theignorant cruelty of Mama Shimerda’s insistence that heshould be buried under the (still unbuilt) crossroads --not out of some vague sympathy, as the makers of thefilm Willa Cather’s Amedca mistakenly surmised, but aperverse acknowledgement of the punishment built intoher culture: suicide is an unforgivable sin because thesinner has no opportunity for repentance.

There was only a single instance when somestudents in one of my classes "questioned the an-swers." Let me tell you about that. This happened atKyushu University in a class of English-major seniors

and graduate students. We were studying A Lost Lady,which happens to be my favorite of all of Cather’snovels. We were going over the text page by page,line by line, and I introduced, among other criticalessays, my own "The Blindness He Had Cherished:The Problem of the Point of View in A Lost Lady"(Renascence shortened the title to "The Point of Viewin A Lost Lady"). I was making the point, developedat some length in my essay, that Niel Herbert does notrepresent the point of view of the author; MarianForrester is not a "lost" lady but a survivor and Nielhas misjudged her; the truth is represented by herhusband Captain Forrester, who "values her." I imme-diately sensed an icy silence in the classroom. Istopped and asked what the problem was. After muchprodding, the truth came out: there was no way theseJapanese students were going to consent to thesuggestion that Marian’s adulterous relationship wasaccepted by her husband. I tried everything I couldthink of: the’difference in their ages, Captain Forres-ter’s seeming lack of sexual interest in a woman whomhe chose to be "an ornament of his house," his appre-c, iation of her devotion to him in his final illness --nothing worked. Then I quoted Tolstoy’s epigraph tothat story of another famous adulteress, AnnaKaredna: "Vengeance is mine; I shall repay," saith theLord. No effect. I tried the argument, also used in myessay, that the Captain’s first name is Daniel, which isHebrew for God is my judge, whereas Niel’s namemeans scorn. I knew that the student who first broughtthe question out into the open, a graduate student whoin the following year became my colleague, was aChristian Fundamentalist, but a similar roadblockexperienced while teaching The Great Gatsby finallyconvinced me that I was not dealing with one student’sinflexibly judgmental attitude but something much morebroadly based in Japanese culture. I had asked forsome basic adjectives to characterize the heroine,Daisy, and pointed to a student. After the customaryevasions (pretending not to hear; pretending I wasasking someone else; rolling his eyes; moving his lipswithout any sound coming out; looking around for helpat his neighbors who were similarly deaf, dumb, andblind), he "finally uttered a single Japanese word. Iasked my long-suffering colleague and translator whatthe word was, and he answered, "He says that she isinhuman." I was overjoyed. Inhuman is truly an excel-lent word to characterize Daisy who engages in anaffair with Gatsby, runs down her husband’s mistress,killing her, and then allows Gatsby to be killed by themistress’s grief-stricken husband who mistakenlybelieves that Gatsby was driving the car. "This isgreat!" I exclaimed. "Please explain why you have saidthafl" "Because she seduced Gatsby." I could notbelieve my ears. "She seduced Gatsby? Gatsby wassitting in his fabulous mansion, like a spider in its web,waiting for her to wander in .... And she seducedhim?" The student dug in his heels. "She was amarried woman, and she had an affair with anotherman." "And what about her husband? Tom was openly

carrying on an affair with Myrtle!" The student lookedat me pityingly and shook his head. He mutteredsomething to the effect, "That’s different." And I hadthe impression that the whole class agreed with him."What’s sauce for the goose..." is obviously not aJapanese proverb.

one of two patterns would emerge: either "My girlfriendand I go shopping, then to lunch in a nice restaurant";or "My boyfriend takes me to the beach on his motor-cycle. We eat the picnic lunch which I prepared"--thelunch sounds depressingly like the breakfast. "After anice afternoon in the shopping mall/on the beach/at themovies, I go home to my parents; we eat dinner [Ispare you the details], and I listen to music/watch amovie on "iV. Then I take a nice long bath!" Howcould you help loving boys and girls like these? Oh,there were one or two exceptions. Yes, I think exactlytwo. One was a boy who wanted to buy a farm inScotland and settle down there. The other was a girlwho wanted to marry a farmer in France and settledown there. I do hope they found each other somehowand worked out a compromise. England, maybe.

What was it like, teaching Willa Cather in Japan?I had the satisfaction of feeling that I introduced mystudents to some new ideas, some new teachingmethods. It was a challenge; it was rewarding; it wasa pleasure; it was different . . . it was fun. It cameclose to my idea of -- happiness!

Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer (Hungary/Austria) helped makeHastings ’93 international In the picture -- Front Row (leftto right): Laxmi Parasuram (India), Hui Li (China). SecondRow: Dalma Brunauer (Hungary/Austria), Helene Perriguey(France). Back Row: Alan Wilkinson (England), Katya Kontor(Russia).

As far as I can remember, that was the only issueon which1 ever experienced a disagreement with myJapanese students. As advertised, they were hard-working and docile. When teaching My Antonia, I gavethem lengthy homework assignments in writing; theydid them without fail or demur. They were used to that.When I tried small discussion groups, they launchedinto the assignments excitedly, though I suspect thatthey often strayed from the topic because they invari-ably lapsed into Japanese and I could not follow them.To bring the study of literature closer to their immedi-ate concerns, for a final examination I chose thefamous Cather quote which also appears on herheadstone: "That is happiness: To be dissolved intosomething complete and great." I gave them the take-

home topic: "What does the word happiness mean toyou?. Describe your perfect day." I wish I could havebrought those papers along with me. They, more thananything else, showed the typical mentality of theaverage young Japanese. The young men wrotesomething like this: "1 wake up, eat breakfast, and geton my motorcycle. With my friend, we go for a ride.We enjoy the ride. We go to the beach, sit down andlisten to rock music. In the evening, we go back home,eat dinner, and then I visit my friend’s home. We watchsome videos." Usually the favorite musicians’ nameswere mentioned. The girls’ papers were longer: "1 getup in the morning, make breakfast: miso soup,steamed rice, fish, and green tea. I get dressed in myfavorite outfit, either miniskirt or shorts." At this point,

A Highschooler Responds to My AntoniaRebecca Pinker, a teacher at Olathe, Kansas,

North High School, kindly shares with us the work (andsense of humor) of her American literature studentJason Manley.

Jim Burdenkills the bigsnake with,&,ntonialooking on.

Russian Peter eats hismelons before he moves.

Wick CuttepsurprisesJim -- and himself.

-- Manley

- 27 -

WILLA CATHER NEWSLETTEREditor: John J. Murphy, Brigham Young UniversityNews Editors: Patricia K. Phillips, WCPM, and Robert Har-

wick, Hastings CollegeBibliographer: Virgil Albe~tini, Northwest Missouri State

UniversityEditorial Assistant: Sally Murphy, Provo, Utah

EDITORIAL BOARD:Bruce P. Baker, University of Nebraska at OmahaSusan J. Rosowski, University of Nebraska-LincolnMerrill M. Skaggs, Drew UniversityDavid Stouck, Simon Fraser UniversityLoretta Wasserman, Annapolis, Maryland

Willa Cather Newsletter welcomes articles, notes andletters to the editor for its Literary Annual and other issues.Address submissions to WCPM, 326 North Webster, RedCloud, Nebraska 68970/Phone (402) 746-2653. Essays andnotes are currently listed in the annual MLA Bibliography.

Reimagining the WestWestern Literature Association

28th Annual Meeting- October 7-9, 1993Wichita, Kansas

Featuring such speakers as:LINDA JASSELSTROM, South Dakota writer and rancher;

WES JACKSON, founder and director of the Land Institute,Salina, Kansas; DAN O’BRIEN, South Dakota wdter and rancher;KENT NELSON, winner of the Edward Abbey 1992 Eco-FictionPrize; LUCI TAPAHONSO, Native American poet, the Universityof Kansas; DONALD WORSTER, Hall Distinguished Professor ofHistory, the University of Kansas.

For information:Diane Quantic, President, Western Literature AssociationEnglish Department, Wichita State UniversityWichita, Kansas 67260-0014Phone (3161 689-3130/Fax (316) 689-3548

YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN THE LIFE AND GROWTHOF THE WILLA CATHER PIONEER MEMORIAL

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AIMS OF THE WCPM¯ To promote and assist in the development and preservation of the

art, literary, and historical collection relating to the life, time, andwork of Willa Cather, in association with the Nebraska StateHistorical Society.

¯ To cooperate with the Nebraska State Historical Society incontinuing to identify, restore to their original condition, andpreserve places made famous by the writing of Willa Cather.

¯ To provide for Willa Cather a living memorial, through the Founda-tion, by encouraging and assisting scholarship in the field of thehumanities.

¯ To perpetuate an interest throughout the wodd in the work of WillaCather.

BOARD OF GOVERNORSKeith Atbers Ron Hull William MountfordVirgil Albertini Robed E. Knoll John J. MurphyWilliam Thomas Betty Kod Harry Obitz

Auld, M.D. Mellanee Kvasnicka Susan RosowskiBruce P. Baker, II Ella Cather Lewis David E. Scherman

tMildred R. Bennett Lucia Woods C. Bertrand SchultzDon E. Connors Lindley Margaret CatherAlicia Engstrom Catherine Cather ShannonJames L. Fitzgibbon Lowell Merrill M. SkaggsJosephine Frisbie John March Helen Cather SouthwickDavid Garwood Dale McDole Gary W. ThompsonRobed Harwick Gary L Meyer Marcella Van Meter

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