The Bookshelf; Willa Cather Pictorial Memoir Uncle Valentine

Welcome to another edition of Bookshelf. I'm Otis Young, one of your hosts on this program, and with me, and this program is Darryl Berg, our perennial guest host, Clarence Forgeberg, has been in Florida. He'll be back soon. Also a special guest on this particular program in which we're talking about Willa Cather, is Virginia Faulkner, who is the editor -in -chief of the University of Nebraska Press, and also a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. The press, which she edits, has just published two new books about Willa Cather. One is called Willa Cather, a pictorial memoir, which has a number of beautiful photographs about where and when Willa Cather lived, interspersed with writings, and also another book, a collection of short stories called Uncle Valentine and other stories. These stories were previously published in magazines and other media, and it's the first time they've been collected into one book. Before we talk about Willa Cather, though with Virginia Faulkner, we want to look at some pictures, which were taken partly from this book, where Willa live. Let's see

those first and we'll come back. Willa Cather was born December 7, 1873, in Maccreek Valley, Virginia. At nine, she came to the open prairies of Nebraska, where every tree was a presence. This became her country. She wrote of deserts and ancient people, and she wrote of gardens and homes and families. She wrote of a growing land, fertile, productive, and humanized by man. Think of her first as a child in Virginia, then a tomboy growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until she went to the University of Nebraska and graduated like a lady. She was a journalist in Lincoln and in Pittsburgh. Published books of poems and short stories,

and worked in New York as an editor of McClure's magazine. In 1912, she published the first of her dozen novels. By 1920, she was known as an important American writer. Think of her working in tents in New Hampshire and on the shores of the Mediterranean, traveling in Paris, or to the island of Grand Manin. Think of her successful assured in the 1920s. She received honors and degrees and grew older. She died in 1947 and became what she had used in creative. Find her in the leaves of her books and in the grasses and trees and clouds. But go first to Red Cloud, a little town in Webster County, Nebraska, where in her childhood

trains whistled in and out, a small town where lives cross, close, and with feeling. Where there was a main street and a Baptist church, and the great music of history at the small Catholic church, now restored by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial. Go to the Cather House. Everything a little on the slant, she said, roofs, windows, and doors. Inside, her grandmother's room has been recreated as she described it in stories, and the attic where the children slept. A baronial hall, she called it. Her own room is still there, with paper she put on herself. Things far away come near, along with books, her collection of sea shells. She admired a Turkish lady music box and put it into a book. But beyond that room, she found other worlds to recreate in her imagination.

For all pioneers and my auntenea, she thought of the flat and formless land she first knew in Nebraska. Not a country at all, she wrote, but the material out of which countries are made. The lark sang in that land, and she wrote, there was a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before. There were wind and weather on the high prairie, and it lasted the furrows in the plowed land, heavy and rich and black, shaped for a growing life. The immigrant pioneers planted orchards. They came together in places like the Dane Church. It was a new civilization. Will a cather began with Nebraska, where springs can

still be found in Virgin Prairie. But there were outward movements, like the flow of the Republican river with its sand bar islands, and her art used other places too. Lake Michigan, its blue wrinkled with gold. She wrote of the people and maces of the southwest, where she said, the earth is the floor of the sky. A long American history is caught in the cities of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellers described in the professor's house. We understand other ways through the ancient church of Laguna, or the cathedral at Santa Fe, or the ruins of Pecos. All this is a story she tells, and death comes for the Archbishop. The order of the church is in the Quebec of shadows on the rock, and the great houses of the south are in Will a cather too. The mill house and the mill, in her last book,

Safira and the slave girl, and the dogwood of a Virginia spring, where her life and her art began. On her grave in New Hampshire is a quotation from my aunt and ear. That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. That is Will a cather. All of those pictures you have just seen are included in this new book, which has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press, called Will a cather, a pictorial memoir. The text of the book is written by Bernice Slote, a professor of English at the university, and she

is also the one she noticed who narrated these pictures and gave the text behind them. We have with us Virginia Faulkner, and of course Darrell Berg. We want to talk about this particular book and some other things that Will a cather had done. Why did you publish this book, really, this particular time, Virginia? Well, it started a long time back. We knew Will as Will as hundreds birthday was coming up, and it back was 1967. Will a cather's niece, Helen a cather's south week, and a husband, Philip a south week. Showed us some gorgeous collect photos. They had taken Will's summer home at Grand Manan, and we thought, oh, we could have a picture book. It was sort of more of a hope than a positive thing, but we began to, you know, inform away collect pictures, and on trips abroad, Bernice Slote would take some pictures and have in your own Paris and places where they'd been in London and Boston.

And finally, as the centennial got closer, talked with the director of the press, Bruce Nichol, and said, do you think we can swing this? And we debated it. And finally, in October of 1971, what Bruce said, let's try to see if we can get this book out to on him is cather on a centennial. So then we began work in a more systematic way. And about this time, I was fortunate enough to meet Lucia Woods, who is now a member of the Board of Governors of the Will look at the Pioneer Memorial, and is a very accomplished photographer. She was extremely interested in our project, and she volunteered to travel around all the places that Will look at that had written about, lived in this country, and so our project took on some more dimensions. And Bruce, Bernice, we do write the text, and so that's how it got underway. What's a beautiful book. I have read some of Will look at her novel, some of her short stories, but this helped me immensely in my understanding of her as an author and the kind of

the scenes that are in her books. You can actually see them now, whereas otherwise I saw them only in words. So this added greatly to my knowledge of the feeling she had for the ground about which she wrote, the territory where she lived, and all of the environment which shaped her as a writer. It helped you to see that Will look at her was a universal human being. She's Nebraska, but she's also Virginia. She's also New York. She's buried in New Hampshire. She's Paris, right? She's Paris. She's Avignon. She's also the Southwest, where the death comes for the Archbishop novel was set. If she were alive now, she would be a hundred years old, Miss Faulkner, and now it seems that her life is becoming cumulative instead of diminishing. Doesn't it appear to you that there's more and more interest in what she's done never before? I think there's a few more. Like most writers, after their deaths, I think there's supposedly about a 10 or 20 -year

pill when they're down, people are not so interested, but I think Will Kelly's case particularly during the 30s. She was criticized as a novelist of nostalgia and as escapist and sort of became fixed in at least in the critical mind. I think never in the mind of her readers is a certain kind of novelist. And then when we assessment again, and I think we in Nebraska can take pride in our contribution, starting particularly with Margaret Bennett, and all the work she did in Red Cloud, and the organizing the Willi -Kather Pony of Memorial Association, and the restoration and collecting of letters and archival materials. And then I think the work of our press, being able to recruit such good critics and writers, sort of almost compelled a critical reassessment. Maybe it would have been coming anyway, but certainly in the last of 15 years

has been a tremendous body of new critical writing about Willi -Kather, seeing her in new lights, new ways. Yes, you know, she came from Virginia. She was nine, I think, when she came to Nebraska. And that was a very painful experience for her, because she loved Virginia as a child. And she came out here, and I remember reading in one passage, that when they were writing out to Katherine, where they originally settled there in Webster County, she would have made it, if it hadn't been for the Larks, and the Larks kept singing that song, the reminder of Virginia. And I almost went under when I heard the Larks, she said, but this conflict, you know, it wasn't as if she left Virginia and became Nebraska for the kind of combustion that she needed for some of her great artistic creation. Yes, I think Dorothy Canfield Fisher said that about her, that coming into the New Land, in some cases, you fall apart, but with

Willi -Kather, it was a stimulus and a challenge, and of course it's a scene in your eye. And there was also a sort of conflict between, say, New York and Red Cloud. She was city, but she was small town. Well, she loved the traditions and richness of the older cultures, yet she loved out here, her whole new country. She's certainly had a great sensitivity, as you're saying, both saying to every kind of environment and every kind of aspect of life, she could be sensitive to the folk tales of the Indians, as she wrote, in the death comes for the Archbishop, be sensitive to the city, to foreign countries, and I think the movement out here probably increased her sensitivity. I was amazed at reading in this book part of her commencement already the way she could put words together. High school graduate. One of three Red Clouds. And came into the university and went five years here. That was a drama critic and literary critic. Also amazed, and it just seems to happen to great artists or great

philosophers, great people many times, that among her friends and associates at the University of Nebraska, were such people as Louise Pound, Jurist, Roscoe Pound, a whole collection of people in that one era who kind of grew up together out here in the Great Plains, and all who went on to become great contributors to mankind. Lincoln was really quite a town in those days, wasn't it? It was indeed. I think it's very well sketched in Bernie Slough's book, The Kingdom of Otto, essay on a young writer. As you said, when we were talking in the instant town, just grew up here on the prairie, but then the contrast, the other fancy parties in town with iced oysters on the half -shell, and yet prairie fires going on, and two of them getting lost in the prairie. And mud streets? Yes, mud streets. And people living inside these just outside what you could have called the city limits. So the 20s think of a 26 passenger lines coming into this

town, and actors. 100 companies playing here, yeah. And the Lansing, the Lansing and the Lysium were the great theaters. That was the Funk Opera House also. The Funk was a 30. The Lansing would seat 1800 people, and the Lysium I think would seat 1200. And the great actors of the day, like Joseph Jefferson, would come through in John Drew, and when they would come through Lincoln, Nebraska, they would know they would have to be on their metal, because there was a very perceptive critic sitting there in the audience in the person of Willough Cather. And she was courageous as a college student as a critic. She wasn't afraid to take off on anyone. And it's amazing that in those years she was writing for the Nebraska state journal. She also contributed to a weekly paper, the Courier, or the column for that for time, and then

they were reporting for another Lansing paper, the Lincoln News. I think she reported she talked with from Creep one year after that. The important thing to me, and looking at this pictorial book, and reading again some biographical sketches of her, is that you also get a history through reading about her of Lincoln and of Nebraska from a different perspective than you would are near to get it. And you realize that this is a kind of a, Lincoln has been a kind of a cultural oasis in the middle of the Great Plains, where there's no reason to be an oasis almost. So it's a kind of a miracle. Well, the idea of Willough Cather coming to Nebraska seems almost miraculous to me. We use that word probably a little more generous than literary people, Otis. But here's this great expanse of rolling prairie undeveloped. And here on the other side of the country, a child is born. And this child somehow in the arrangement of circumstances arrives in the brain, and she becomes the symbols. She becomes the spokesman. She becomes the

medium through which the soul of that state finds its articulation. To me, it's almost miraculous. Makes you believe in the doctrine of predestination. We also have, as you were saying to us before the program, Ms. Faulkner, probably the greatest Willough Cather scholar at the University in the person of Bernie Slote, who does the text for this book. Yes. Well, I think when we talk about the Cather scholarship, we all have to start with noted Bennett and her great work down in Red Cloud. So much would be impossible if she had not. Well, she's literally spent 40 years collecting and preserving and studying and getting together a great group of people down in Red Cloud and growing in people from all over the world to keep the good word going. She's kept the records alive really, too. And then Bernice, though, has really picked up on that. And it's been gone in depth, hasn't she? In many areas of Willough Cather's life, which we hadn't known about very much before. I think why we referred to the Kingdom of Art as perhaps the most important of our Cather

publications is that, you know, she recovered the so -called last year of Willough Cather's life. Everyone thought, which is a graduate of the University in 1995 that she went down to Red Cloud and sought. And that suddenly out of blue lands in Pittsburgh as the editor of a magazine. But Bernice was through her research found that Willough was writing like a streak all the time and publishing columns and important criticism about books, writing stories. And in fact, framing the critical views that any more we find formed, I think, govern her art for all her life. I asked you before the show, Ms. Faulkner, what was your favorite work of Willough Cather? And you told me that the one that you like right now was a little book, which has recently been issued in paperback entitled The Professor's House. Why is that your favorite at this moment? Well, because it has so many connections, this is again hard

to say about, and tries with Willough Cather's own life, and with the curious quality, the all of her peaceness of her writing. It relates to other earlier books, Alexander's Bridge and one of ours. But I think it was, again, this is leaving myself on the limb, I think it is a book in which she was solving a personal crisis. I think Lawrence, the H. Lawrence, you heal yourself in your work. And I think perhaps this book accomplishes something of that for her. Would you agree that one of ours was one of her less significant works? Well, it is not one of my favorites, and I think certainly has been critically hopped on, even though it got. They feel a surprise, but students who like it very much, surprising number of students at the present time seem to feel very strongly about it, like a great deal. Where was that written in the period of her productivity at first? One of ours was published in 1922, but it was written from

a, it took her about two years, 1922, as you know, the idea of it came from her cousin, her GP Cather was killed in France in May 1918, and so this moved her very greatly, and that was, I suppose, the beginning impetus for the story, but she was a very, very close to her. She felt very personally about. Maybe students sense that too. They can maybe sense the pathos and the deepness of the book, which is partly autobiographical. Well, in a sense, I would say it was autobiographical. Well, you can't say that about anything, but I think perhaps you like the idea of what she called Claude, an inarticulate young man, biting his way through the world, and of course, for him to realize himself, he had to go abroad and die. Maybe that appeals to her. And for her to realize herself, she had to make a different kind of sacrifice, and you get this idea that sacrifice is perpetual in her life. She

sacrifices everything for her art. Passion is the ingredient. She pours her, as Markham puts it, pours her splendid strength through every blow. And I was impressed with this statement by Mr. Woodress, James Woodress, and he is by whether or not artists have to sacrifice everything might be debated, but Fremstad was the kind of artist who had, and Willa Cather had believed since she was 17, that the God of Art accepts only human sacrifices. You're up to that, yes. She had to pursue excellence, which always takes sacrifice, and you can see this in the phraseology, as we talked about a while ago, even in her commencement oration, the way she could put words together. And that takes time and plain old hard work, plus creativity, which involves sacrifice. Well, she always made a distinction between what her absolute art, I mean, what she put all of herself into, and then you know, for many years, she had to write to stay alive. I would

not call it hack work, but which you know that sought of it as, and perhaps some of the stories in Uncle Valentine's, or else she did not think highly enough of them to include them in the collected edition of her work. And yet they find stories. Yeah, that's just to say a little more about this book. We mentioned it in the beginning of the program, Uncle Valentine and other stories. It's a new publication by the University of Nebraska Press of uncollected stories of Willa Cather and stories that had appeared in magazines and other kinds of publications, as you said, which she wrote to get paid. But sometimes when a good artist does that, that they've already made themselves, in a sense, they already have their technique worked out. And so even when they write just to get paid, it comes out good. This happens in musicians a lot of times because of their whole creativity is already there working and they can't shut that off. These stories all appeared in very reputable national magazines that I was thinking more of the full of pop -balling things she did do in around 1900. But again, as I say, she undoubtedly

did not regard these as her finest work or she would have collected them. But they show a remarkable range. Well, one story, the last one in the book is collected in her collected works. This is an earlier version of it and it has some interesting changes in all the other stories. I think I'll appear in the century in the script as magazines like that. Each one is fascinating. Well, you know, I just recently reread The Death Comes for the Archbishop and that in a sense, to me, was a unified collection of short stories. I found I could read almost any section of that book in itself and have a sense of completeness, made more sense, of course, to read the whole thing. But she knew how to put short segments together, which she does very well in all of these also. So she was a competent, short story writer as well as a novelist. She was a superb technician. Again, I will begin to discover what an innovative writer she was. I think it has been said that if her work had been subjected to the intensive textual

analysis, T .S. Eliot, as well, has been subjected to critics would have been in for some surprises, Sona. Yes. Was was she a born writer or did she make it? Oh, she was a born writer. She was a born writer like Jim Thorpe was a born athlete, wasn't she? Yes. And she didn't really have to worry much about finding publishers. Eventually, she just scored. Well, I don't know. I know it wasn't either the first one to really give me. I wrote a first book. I wrote a collection of portraits and I believe that she paid for its publication itself. Oh, she did. She got started the way many people wanted to. Once she got going. That was probably the last time she paid anybody. I'm sure it was. But she was also as these biographical materials point out an outstanding administrator, which as we said before, the program is a unique combination. Usually, I shouldn't say usually, many times a creative artistic person does not have managerial skills. Don't we have much sense? She could do both. She could run a magazine, edit the magazine, and at the same time be very productive

in an artistic way. And deal with a very volatile stable of writers. The best writers of the time were working from a close and why not easy to deal with, but she could. And McClure told her that she really ought to forget about writing and be a managing editor. Well, he wanted to work for him, and she was holding that organization together. You know, there was one of those New York critics who said, I don't care what anybody writes about Nebraska. I'm not interested. Put it a little stronger than that. But little Catherine said, ah, I will be the first to bring the muse to my country. And she did. And once again, we've got to get back, I think, to this quality. It's and it wasn't just Nebraska that was her country. We were fortunate that she was the person who expressed the soul of Nebraska, but she also expressed the soul of the whole country. Well, it was, I think, fortunate are fortunate. And certainly, at that

in the 80s and 90s, we were a melting pot here. And nationalities of the world were here. I think that my mother's phrase, she has, but the foreign nationalities, Slavs, Swedes, Bohemians, spread across our bright prairies, like dobs of paint on a palette. She really began to have an international view very early. We took here about one world, but it was one world for Willa. Indeed. And Webster County Nebraska. But certainly comes out in this book, this pictorial memoir, this mixture of people as it shows of some of the various kinds of homes and kinds of buildings and where they live. Well, we've been talking about two new books published by the University of Nebraska Press, both just issued in commemoration of the Willa Catholic Centennial. And we think you'll want to look at both of these and get them. Willa Cather, a pictorial memoir, which is full of beautiful pictures, not only of Nebraska, but all of the environments which she knew as a writer and as a child, and also Uncle Valentine and other stories, an uncollected, a new book

of uncollected books, and a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected books, and a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected books, and a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected, a new book of uncollected,