Image of Nebraska

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voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble

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is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh

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ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando

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callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where

you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble

Oh Shannando Your voice is callin' where you rollin' ribble Tom Height is my name and old bachelor I am. You'll find me out west in the land of fame. You'll find me out west on an elegant plane, starving to death on my government claim. So hurrah for Greer County, the land of the free, the land of the bed buggrass hopper and flea. I'll sing of its praises and tell of its fame, while starving to death on my

government claim. So goodbye to Greer County, where blizzards arise, where the sun never sinks and a flea never dies, and the wind never ceases, but always remains till it starves us all off of our government claim. You ask the place we like the best, the sand hills all, the old sand hills, the place concaters call their home and prairie chickens freely roam. In all the brusques wide domain, it is the place we long to see again, the sand hills are the very best, she is the queen of all the rest. We've reached the land of desert sweet, where nothing grows for man to eat, the wind does blow with blistering

heat, or the plane so hard to beat. Nebraska land, Nebraska land, as on my desert soil I stand and gaze away across the plains. I wonder why it never rains. In this salute to three authors, Willa Cather, Mari Sandos and John Nyhart, whose writings have helped to shape the image of Nebraska. We have looked at the Nebraska of Nyhart and the Nebraska of Sandos, and now as we turn to the world of Willa Cather, we are joined by Professor Robert Huff of the University's English Department. An American critic has recently said that there are three great literary villages in America, Hannibal because of Mark Twain, Concord because of Thoreau and Emerson, and Red Cloud in Nebraska because of Willa Cather. And I think this is a high

company, two -place Willa Cather in, and I think she deserves to be there. Willa Cather comes from South Eastern, or Southern Nebraska, South Central Nebraska, unlike the other two people, Nyhart comes from North Eastern Nebraska, and Mari Sandos comes from Northwestern Nebraska. And so Nebraska is pretty well covered by our three distinguished writers. And using the materials of Red Cloud, Willa Cather, of course, was using materials of her youth in her early years, but she had not always been there, had she? In fact, that's one of the curiosities. And I think one of the real fortunate, one of the fortunate facts about her life, she came to Nebraska when she was about 10 years old, having lived previous to that time in an established community, an established culture in Virginia. She came very impressionable young girl, bringing then a foreign point of view. She had, as you might say, a perspective. And though she left Prompt, like I think she was only here 10 or 12 years, she took with her such profound impressions

that once she was away from here, she could write about it with a great lucidity and great love. And the impressions that came with some of the foreign people that had immigrated to Nebraska as we have collected the riches of all of the world, using all of that and her feeling for the land. Yes, and she, just like a blotter almost, she just blotted up, spunged up these impressions, it seems to me. And of course, very often was very much impressed by the immigrant. I'd like to read a quotation here that she made in 1921 when she returned to the country after almost a year's absence. Whenever I crossed the Missouri River coming into Nebraska, the very smell of the soil tore me to pieces. My deepest affection was not for the other people and the other places I had been writing about. I love the country where they still call me Willie Cather. I had searched for books telling about the country I love. It's romance, the heroism and strength and courage of its people that had been plowed in the very furrows of the soil. And I did not find them. And so I wrote opiannears. Opiannears was published

50 years ago now, 1913. And thus began her really distinguished career of almost regional writing. Her opiannears and my Antonia and one of ours and these other stories all have to do with Southwestern Nebraska. And these are the great stories. These are the great stories, I think, really. She said that she got all of her material that amounted to anything before she was 15. And these early experiences, the early emotional experiences were the important things. People who knew her reported that as a very young woman, as a girl, really, she questioned everybody. You know, this insistent curiosity. So she wanted to know how the plant was made and she wanted to know the motives of everybody in town. She must have been a very odd little girl. Well, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was her good friend, Nebraska too, was telling about Willa Cather. And she said she thought in many ways she was more of a poet than a prose writer. She had a poetic quality because she did always have

the feeling that what happened to someone in youth had an emotional impact. It was strong and fresh and new and this was the important part of her life. And of course, she did write some poems early in her life as she used the materials of her family, the events that happened to her at home. And this kind of use of material over and over, red cloud, the events of her youth will be, I think, very strikingly understood as we read all of her work. Not long ago, Elsie Cather, Willa Cather's sister was telling me about some of these things. Well, I am particularly fond of the one called the namesake, of course, which really refers to my mother's brother who was killed in the Confederate Army, fighting in the Confederate Army at the second battle of Manassas. Mother had only three brothers and all three of them were in the Confederate Army. And this is called the namesake,

was Willa Cather actually named for her? She wasn't actually named for him. He was William, of course, and she was Willa, but she was not named for him. She was named for a little sister of my father's who had died as a child. In a way, she pretended that she was named for him. She just pretended to fight herself with him. Did everybody call her Willa? Well, of course, nobody in the family called her Willa, and nobody in Red Cloud called her Willa. We always called her Willa, but as soon as she left Red Cloud and came down to Lincoln, all the rest of her life, to the friends she made after she came to Lincoln, she was always Willa. Well, then in the namesake, there was a feeling, you know, William and Willa probably very much alike. Oh, yes. And we always referred to my uncle, William, as Uncle Willa. I never heard mother call him William, she called him Willa. So they really both were Willa. They both were Willa, yes. Well, I'm sure that this is something in the family that was a mental great deal to everyone. They thought of the uncle who died

in the Civil War. And there is in the poem a feeling that reminds me of some things in her books too, of young people dying. And the feeling of loss. Did you feel anything of this and the things that she wrote in her poetry? Well, yes. Of course, it's always easier for people when they're young to dwell on the idea of death as they get older. And the actual fact is closer. That's true. And there is another poem, one of the home poems that deals with the death of a young man. The night expressed. Do you remember anything about it? I remember very well. It's always been one of my favorites. It describes so accurately and so clearly the approach to Red Cloud along the Republican River as the train comes in. And I remember, well, the night that Willa wrote the poem of a young

man who was one of the boys of the town had died somewhere away. I don't remember where. And we all sat out in the yard. And you heard the story then that is you heard the news. Yes, we heard the news of the. We listened to the train as it actually came in and we knew that the body was on it. In the poem, the scene is at the station. Oh, yes. But we were. Yes. I suppose some people did. We didn't. We were all there in the yard. And we heard the train pull in. We knew that the young friend was on the train being brought home. And Willa went upstairs then to her bedroom. And the rest of us stayed in the yard. And I remember watching the light in her bedroom and she just wrote the poem then and there. Bernice, when you were editing April Twilight's Willa Cather's volume of poems of 193, did you find in those poems themes and ideas which you were to

turn up later in the novels? Oh, yes. Elsie Cather was describing the namesake is the idea of the young man killed in battle. That occurs later in one of ours and other novels. The idea of the night express came in one of the short stories. The sculptor's funeral as you have the body brought back. Other images such as children gathering on an island, plotting things or young people together, dreaming of the future, all of these come in later books. And the themes and descriptions are all pretty much the same. Red cloud becomes black hawk in the sand city and all the different ones too. They're all taken from this one model. Again, you can see that there is a great continuity between this early work of 193, the poetry and the later work. But between 193 and 1913, when she said with Opie and Ears, I have at last got into home pasture, there is a period in which she's worked as a journalist and done many other jobs teaching too. You know, it's curious that it took her so long to find her own material. Of course, the same thing had been

true of Neuhart. It had taken Neuhart some years to find that, just as with Wellacather, to find that what was closest to hand was the most valuable. I think that's rather nice. Why did it take so long? Well, I really think that she needed some distance. She needed some meloness. The stories in the Troll Garden, this early collection in 1903, are very often bitter stories. Her attitudes toward Nebraska was, by no means one sighted. She saw the materialism, she saw the smallness of the small town. And then later, I think, as she grew older and she grew to appreciate it, then she could write about it. And I think she admired these people in a different way than she hated them. And then he had to wear off. It was a matter of fact, many of these novels are characterized by a certain kind of nostalgia, a certain elidiac quality that is, for the past, that is a sense that perhaps the nobility, which she admires, is no longer there. What she is mourning the passing. And there is a feeling, too. I think we notice of the delight in the land, the delight in the place of Nebraska. As

she said about the time in the early days, there was nothing but land. Not a country at all, but the material, a lot of which countries are made. And this is the drama that began to appeal to her. Yes, and I think very often her landscapes are simply landscapes in which there is nothing else, but the land or the sky or something to that. So, humans are very often not present. I would like to read a passage from opinears, in which she is discussing the looks of the countryside when the plow has been through. The furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth with such a strong, clean smell and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow, rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet. There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. And I have one too that I'd like to read. This is again

from opinears. The shaggy coat of the prairie has vanished forever. One looks out over a vast checkerboard marked off in squares of wheat and corn, light and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles. One can count a dozen galley -painted farmhouses that gilded weather veins on the big red barns, winked at each other across the green and brown and yellow fields. And this picture of Nebraska and the people in it continued through a very distinguished career. Some of the other books, as you said, the Song of the Lark, one of ours. How many are there, Bob? There are really five. The period from 1913 to 1923 is a Nebraska period, and then the professor's house is a little later too. But one of ours, the Mayanthania Song of the Lark, opinears are the main ones. Now, she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of ours in 1923, and it is this period I'd like to think of as the magical working years of her life. Here is Willa Kathera, she looked then in one of her favorite

pictures. She's a very striking looking woman, yes. Now, she is best known to Nebraska's, perhaps the book best known to Nebraska's, is Mayanthania. Yes, Mayanthania. One of the characteristics of this novel is that in a countryside which has been thought to be drab, there are all these colorful people. I like to think you see of the splotches of color from Bohemia, laid over the reds and the browns and the earth colors of the countryside. And I think she did too. I think in this book she got the sensuousness, the gusto for life of the immigrants, better than she ever got it again or before. And I think this is what she admired about those people. Their love of life and the fact that they didn't care so much about money and material things, they loved to have fun. In Mayanthania, I think it's interesting that she uses so many of the places and the people that she knew. For instance, she used an immigrant girl, Annie Pavelka, for Mayanthania. She uses red cloud, of course, for the place. And you can recognize all the places there if you go down to red cloud and visit

the divide and the museum. And also, you find people like Carrie Meiner Sherwood, Mrs. Sherwood, who was a friend of Willa Cathers and who appears in Mayanthania as one of the Harling girls. Now, recently Willa's friend, Mrs. Sherwood, talked with Mildred Bennett about her knowledge of Willa Cathers, and here is that interview as they were talking together. Mrs. Sherwood, would you tell us about the first time you saw Willa Cathers? Well, the first time I saw her was in the store and she was sitting on the base shelf back of the shoe counter having a pair of shoes fitted. And she was a very attractive child and apparently quite reserved and principally occupied with the answering her father's questions,

which he was playing her with. As most parents, he was trying to show her off, I suppose. And I think maybe that I was as much attracted by her costume as I was by her face. She was dressed in those days, you know, they didn't have fabrics looking like fur, like they do nowadays. But Willa had on a coat and a hat that looked like leopard skin. And of course, that was very unusual in those days. What year was this, Mrs. Sherwood? 1883? About 83, I suppose. And Willa would have been 83 or 4. She would have been 9 or 10 years old then. Yes. What questions was her father asking her? Oh, he was asking her questions about the history of the colonies in Virginia. And he was a great historian himself. And

I think he had her pretty well posted and very proud of her being able to answer his questions. Well, then you watched her grow up in Red Cloud from that time on. Would you tell us what kind of little girl she was? Well, of course, in a very short time, they moved into our neighborhood. And I found her quite reserved in a way and also very free. She was like two people. She was one to me and another to the children. She associated with my sisters who were one younger and one older than she. And they were playmates. But with me, she was a companion. What did she want from you? What was her aside from the companionship? What was she continually trying to find out from you? Well, I don't know. She was

always asking questions. She was constantly asking questions when she used to walk with me to the store. And we'd stand outside the door of the store and talk. And one day my father said, what under the sun do you spend so much time with that child for? She's too curious. And so that was trouble. What did she always asking for questions? What did she want to know about? What sort of thing? All about the people. The store was always filled with foreign people. And if she saw them, then she wanted to know about them. And she'd have questions to ask about them. Some of these people she used later on in her books. They came back to life in her writing, for instance, like Silas Garber. I never knew what she was asking questions for. But as long as she was interested, I always tried to answer her.

About that time, Annie Pavellka or Annie Sedgillac came to your place. Tell us something about the sort of girl Annie was, because later on she became my aunt Nia. Well, Annie was a very beautiful girl. She was about 16 years of age. And she had a wonderful complexion and beautiful hair. And a very stately position for a girl, for a young girl. And she was interested in everything and everybody. And she was unusually kind. She was just about my own age. And so we really enjoyed Annie. And I think she enjoyed us. And I was always interested in her because of the way she took hold of everything that Mama was trying to teach her in her American way. Of course, your mother was the Mrs. Harling in my aunt Nia. Do you think that Annie was

pretty much the way Willock Heather described her in my aunt Nia? You think that's an adequate picture of her? An adequate one of your home life, too. Yes, very, very. It was very true. She compared it to Mama. She thought that Annie was one who liked to feed children and see them in comfortable warm beds. That was Annie. In fact, your brother even had a favorite hickory cake that's mentioned in my aunt Nia. And I understand you still have the recipe in the family for that hickory cake that Annie used to make. Well, the important part of that cake was picking out the nuts. And I suppose the children did that in the kitchen. Well, hickory nuts, you know, were not easy to, they were in the first place, they were hard to crack. And then after they were cracked, they were hard to pick out of the shell. Sometimes took Annie a week to pick enough for, make a cup full for a cake. We would think that was a very tiresome job now. We'd go to the store and buy them.

Tell us about Willock Heather's visits back to Red Cloud after she became famous. What did she want to do, mainly? What things did she remember and want to repeat? Oh, visiting over at Governor Garbers and going out in the country. The places that she had lived when she first came to town and meeting the people that she knew for so many years. What was her favorite method of traveling on these trips if it was possible? Horse and buggy. She liked the horse and buggy days. And she just liked an automobile very much and she didn't have very much confidence in one. And she had less confidence in the drivers usually. Willock Heather said several times and she said it in one of the letters to you that the things that impressed her the most happened to her

when she was a girl, that her whole life was influenced by what happened up to the time she was 15. In reviewing her work in your mind, do you think that's true that what happened there in Red Cloud were the important years to her? Oh, certainly must have been because it was her whole life. And that's what she used thereafter. Yes. Did you ever ask her about how she felt about her life work and did she give you any answer about how she felt about her work? Oh, yes. Once when she was home, after she had written several books and done some very notable work, I said to her, were you satisfied with it with choosing literature as your profession? She said, oh, yes, Carrie. She walked up and down the floor. She said, oh, yes, yes. She says, with Anthony, I feel that I have made a real contribution to American letters. In 1920, Sinclair Lewis commenting on Willa Cather said, Miss Cather

is Nebraska's foremost citizen. The United States knows Nebraska because of Willa Cather's books. And we can all know Willa Cather the better because of Mrs. Bennett's activity down in Red Cloud. She has collected a museum. She has herself responsible for the Willa Cather pioneer memorial down there. And they have all kinds of wonderful things. Will help us understand how Willa Cather got to be able to explain it so well. And I think they explain the creation of beauty that she made of Nebraska. Edith Lewis, a friend of hers, wrote that, I think no one ever found Nebraska beautiful until Willa Cather wrote about it. She had to create the beauty from which she wrote. I think it's quite extraordinary that we sometimes get the truth of a place through its artists. Yes, it is. Willa Cather's books are filled with pioneers and artists, especially musicians. And at first blush, that might seem odd. But really, I think it isn't. What Willa Cather saw in the pioneers and what she saw in the artist was that both were creative. Both were making something out of nothing. And it's this that she admired in both. Yes. And this is all the way through her novels as you recall. She's always talking about a

splendor in life. This is what the yearning was for to create something to achieve a kind of splendor in life. And she did, I think, really achieve. For achievement, it's considerable. It seems to me. In 1903, she wrote something called a sculptor's funeral. And there's a young man called Harvey Merrick in that book. And the Easterner, who accompanied Harvey Merrick's body back to San City, remarked that no one would have ever heard of San City had had not been for Harvey Merrick. And this seems to me a little prophetic. Maybe no one would have heard of Red Cloud without Willa Cather. Certainly, we wouldn't feel about Red Cloud as we do. Perhaps we wouldn't feel about Nebraska as we do if it weren't for Willa Cather, showing us what we could, what we can see here. Now, all of these three, Nigh Heart Sandows and Cather, did make a new state almost as certainly as the laws did. Certainly they did. They brought us all home. That is, they turned a land into a country. They turned a place into a civilization. And you know, I begin to think as I've heard these people talk, how all of them seem to be

young people. Eager, excited, alive, questioning, reading, studying, observing, trying to get the vision of what Willa Cather called youth in the bright Medusa. And this is what I like to think too about the image of Nebraska, that it's not a static thing. That it is actually coming in terms of creative young people who are alive and are moving toward some kind of splendor. Some kind of splendor in a land that we know very well, and that Willa Cather in one of her poems said, was like this, how smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri. Even in my sleep, I know when I have crossed the river. I've traveled all over this country, prospecting and digging for gold. I

tunneled hydraulic and cradled and I have been frequently sold. I tried to get out of this country, but poverty forced me to stay. Until I became an old settler, now nothing can drive me away. Nothing can drive me away, or nothing can drive me away. Until I became an old settler, now nothing can drive me away. Until I became an old settler, now nothing can drive me away. Until I became an old settler, now nothing can drive me away.

Thank you very much.