Nebraska's Historic Places; #4; Willa Cather's Home

This program is funded in part by viewers like you who are members of Nebraska's for public television. Additional funding provided by the Institute of Museum Services. This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together. And by the end of the first autumn that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. These words are Willa Cathars, written many years after she left the prairie of her Nebraska youth to become one of the leading figures in American literature.

Cathars momentous arrival on the wide open prairie and her few formative years in the town of Red Cloud inspired works of fiction which defined the formative experience of the settling of the great plains. This is the childhood home of the Pulitzer Prize -winning novelist Willa Cathars. Although she never called it Red Cloud in her books, this little Nebraska town and its people were the prototypes of small towns and characters in six of her 12 novels. More than using Red Cloud simply as a location in which to set her fiction, she appealed her stories

with characters who were true to the 19th century settlement experience. People she first encountered here as a child. I think that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15. That's the important period when one's not writing. Those years determine whether one's work will be poor and thin or rich and fine. When Willa's parents, Charles and Mary Virginia Cathars moved their family to Webster County Nebraska from Virginia in 1883. Willa was only 10 years old and the town of Red Cloud was only a few years older. The country around the town was just a few seasons from raw prairie. New immigrants were coming day by day to take up land. And as the land was made to produce, the town prospered too.

The town, the country and the young girl grew up together and today they are inextricably intertwined. The Cathars lived out of town on the divide, the high country between the river valleys. Here too had settled newcomers from far and wide. Colonies of European people, Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, spread across our bronze prairies like the dobs of color on a painter's palette. Cathar recalled the powerful impressions that she had of the immigrant struggles to become Americans. No child with a spark of generosity could have kept

from throwing herself into the fight these people were making, to master the language, to subdue the soil, to hold their land, and to get on in the world. The newcomers struggle became the inspiration for Cathars' first novel, Oh Pioneers, published in 1913 when Cathar was 40. She tells of the courage and vision of an immigrant woman, Alexandra Bergsson, a character she composed of bits and pieces of the many pioneer women who created a new country out of just an idea. In one key scene, Cathar describes the moment when Alexandra knows that her destiny is out here in the high country of the divide. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and

strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breath of it until her tears blinded her. Then the genius of the divide, the great free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. Not everyone was able to tame the land. After a year of farming, Charles Cathar gave it up and moved his family into town. He opened a farm loan and land office business which prospered. In Red Cloud, Charles Cathar installed his family in this little house on the corner of Third Avenue and Cedar Street. It was from the comfort of this house that Willa would venture forth

to form her impressions of the town and the people who would later figure so prominently in much of her fiction. Cathar was given a room of her own under the eaves and the attic. It was a most important event in the life of her imagination. She recalled it later as the fictional Thea Cronberg in Song of the Lark. From the time when she moved up into the wing, Thea began a double life. During the day, when the hours were full of tasks, she was one of the Cronberg children. But at night, she was a different person. On Fridays and Saturdays, she always read for a long while after she was in bed. She had no clock and there was no one to nag her. Several of Cathar's fictional characters were based on prominent Red Cloud citizens. In

1871, Captain Silas Garber, a Union Army veteran, founded the town and named it Red Cloud. Silas Garber was elected governor of Nebraska four years later and served two terms. He became a successful businessman and in 1883 built this bank which today serves as the Cathar Museum. Although Silas Garber was one of the most powerful men in the young town, it was his youthful vibrant wife, Lyra, who made an indelible impression on the young Willa Cathar. Later, she would cast Lyra and Silas Garber in the roles of the main characters Daniel and Marion Forester in her novel, A Lost Lady. Like Marion Forester, Lyra Garber loses everything when her husband's bank fails in the hard times of the 1890s and her world begins to unravel. Besides the Garbers, there were many others, each with a story to tell. There were Willa's neighbors,

the miners who lived here. Cathar said there was a little bit of Julia Miner in each of the mothers in her fiction. Mrs. Miner became the model for Mrs. Harling and Cathar's most beloved novel, Mayan Tunea. Cathar dedicated the book to the daughters of the house, Carrie and Irene. The Cathar family physician Dr. McKibbie lived here. He turned up later as the sympathetic Dr. Archie in Song of the Lark. To the remarkably observant young Willa Cathar, lives in the little towns were lived on the surface, with all their desires and fears clearly visible, like the curving furrows of the newly ploughed fields. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman

you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say, good morning, and go on. It is a close shave. Not everybody in Red Cloud was able to live the good life. In Cathar's fictional little towns, the halves and the half -nots were separated by visible and invisible boundaries. In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, lived all the humbler citizens, the people who voted, but did not run for office. One of these humble people made a powerful and lasting impression on the young Willa Cathar. She was a Czech immigrant named Annie Pavelka, who found work in town as a hired girl for the miners, Willa's neighbors. The strength of Annie Pavelka's character later became the backbone of one of the

writers most popular and critically acclaimed works, My Antonea. This novel follows closely the facts of Annie Pavelka's life. The fictional Antonea meets the novel's narrator, Jim Burton, when they are both children. At the darkest moment of winter, Antonea's father kills himself, and she moves into town to work as a hired girl. The story moves through tragedy to further tragedy, as Antonea survives an attempted rape, is seduced and bears the child out of wedlock. 20 years after the troubling events of her youth, she has married, moved back to a farm on the divide, and has become mother to a large brood. Jim recalls the moment when he, Antonea, and her children visited the rootseller where the fruits of the family's labor were stored. Antonea and I went up the stairs first, and the children waited. We were standing outside talking when they all came running up the steps

together, big and little toe heads and gold heads and brown and flashing little naked legs, a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It may be dizzy for a moment. Catherine's Antonea is a survivor who redeems herself through her work, transforming the land, through her steadfastness in the face of great adversity, and through her great, giving motherhood. When my Antonea appeared in 1918, it was a modest success in terms of sales, but critics recognized that something significant had occurred in American literature. Since its publication, my Antonea has never been out of print. The Young Willow was quite an unusual character. Her high school teachers noted, her astonishing familiarity with classical English literature and her inability to spell correctly. Her love of Latin and above all,

a personality so striking in its originality, daring and vital force that no one could possibly ignore her. Her fascination with science led her to work as an assistant in Dr. Henry Cook City Pharmacy. She loved music and the arts, and performed in plays and opera house productions. The Railroad, which was on the main line from Omaha to Denver, brought her into contact with a larger world. It was at this point in her life that she knew that she would be leaving Red Cloud. In her novel Lucy Gayhart, the train station symbolized this escape to the greater world. The station platform was soon full of restless young people, glancing up the track, looking at their watches, as if they could not endure their own town a moment longer. Catherine left Red Cloud in 1890 and enrolled at the University in

Lincoln, where her interest in writing was stimulated after she first saw her name in print. After graduating, Catherine moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, where she worked for the home monthly magazine and the Pittsburgh leader newspaper. Eventually, she settled in New York and became the leading magazine editor of her day. Her first novel lengthworks of fiction were published a few years after the turn of the century, and new ones appeared every few years throughout her life. By the 1930s, Catherine was regarded as one of the major American novelists. Although Catherine left Red Cloud behind as she made her way in the world, the little town was never far from her thoughts. Red Cloud became a touchstone for her life in fiction. In opioniers, Catherine put it this way. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

In many ways, this church represents Willa Catherine's continuing ties to her childhood home. After she left Nebraska in 1896, she never lived in Red Cloud again, but she did return home for visits from time to time. She became a member of Grace Episcopal Church at the age of 50 during one of those trips home. Willa Catherine donated two of the stained glass windows in memory of her parents, and after she died in 1947, memorial services were held here. Each December 7th on Willa's birthday, a mass is offered for her. Willa Catherine became one of the most important writers in

20th century American literature. Her work has had an impact on almost every subsequent American writer of consequence. More than that, her fiction continues to speak to us of enduring human truths, conflicts, and passions. The young Willa Catherine sat in her attic room and dreamed about her future. Later, that room and the intimate world of late 19th century Red Cloud became one of the central images of the world she created in her imagination. A rich world which transcends the realm of the particular to attain the goal of universal truth, of art, a world which continues to speak powerfully to us today. There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country that have been singing the same

five notes over for thousands of years. Thank you very much.

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