Celebrating Willa Cather's classic works and enduring influence

Feb. 16—During her life, Willa Cather was "obsessed with her privacy," biographer Benjamin Taylor says.

It was that obsession — an understandable one for a woman who was almost certainly a closeted lesbian — that led Cather to stipulate in her will future biographers could not quote directly from her letters, only paraphrase them.

That lasted until 2013, when a 700-page book of hundreds of her letters was published more than 65 years after her death.

The ability to finally describe her life in her own words is what made Taylor feel it was time to write a new biography of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, which was released last November.

Taylor, whose previous books include works about Saul Bellow, Marcel Proust, and Philip Roth, has been a fan of Cather since he was in the sixth grade, growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. During a trip to the school library, his teacher recommended he read My Ántonia, a book about Bohemian immigrants that's set in Nebraska.

BIOGRAPHY

CHASING BRIGHT MEDUSAS: A LIFE OF WILLA CATHER by Benjamin Taylor, Viking, 192 pages

"She said, 'This is a book we usually recommend to the girls, but it's about a boy as much as it's about a girl, so I think you'll like it,'" Taylor recalls. "And I did like it. I don't know what I really got out of My Ántonia at that age, but the interest stuck through thick and thin and what Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Faulkner have been for other writers, Cather was to me."

That love wasn't diluted by the research process for his current Cather biography.

"I felt so at home with the material," he says. "I expect that I'll look back on that as one of the happiest passages of my life: my months and years with Willa."

He says he was struck by how frank Cather was about her personal life for the time. She lived for almost 40 years with editor Edith Lewis, frequently visiting and staying in Northern New Mexico, and also had a close emotional relationship with socialite Isabelle McClung. While not acknowledged as such at the time, Taylor says her relationships were "clearly lesbian."

"Two unmarried ladies living together in order not to be alone excited very little curiosity," Taylor says about Cather's relationship with Lewis. "But these were romantic feelings. You see it not just from the letters, but from the way they conducted life."

Public interest in Cather waned following her death in 1947 but had a resurgence in the 1970s with the second wave feminist movement, Taylor says, which ushered more female scholars into the ranks of the academy.

With the 150th anniversary of her birth last year, "her reputation has never been higher than it is today," he says. And ironically, Cather was "an opposite to modernism" during her lifetime, Taylor says.

"She believed in the old values, loyalty, attachment to some high purpose. And she wrote without irony about those things," he says. "She thought ideals are what's most real."

The book is slim, at just about 192 pages, and focuses largely on Cather's literary output to the exclusion of a more detailed excavation of her personal life — a decision Cather herself would have liked. Taylor says he chose to focus on the influence she had on the literary world, which is substantial.

During her lifetime, she was at times dismissed as a regionalist, and her highbrow readership waned after she won the Pulitzer Prize for her World War I novel One of Ours, which some critics, including Hemingway, dismissed because Cather lacked personal experience in combat. Despite the commercial success, the criticism caused Cather to agonize, and her next book had a much more unfurnished style.

Taylor says Cather believed Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927, was the apex of her literary career, but his favorite works of hers are the three she wrote leading up to it in the 1920s: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy.

Taylor says one of the things that drew him to Cather was "the sustained nature of her achievement."

All told, she wrote 12 novels throughout her life, along with several collections of short fiction and poetry. Unlike some of her contemporaries whose output waned later in life, some of Cather's best work — including Death Comes for the Archbishop — were written well into her middle age.

Although he doesn't pretend to be unbiased about his subject, Taylor says Cather had the advantage over some of her male contemporaries because she didn't suffer from the typical literary maladies, most notably, alcoholism (or arguably, PTSD from fighting in WWI).

"One of the things one notes in that triumvirate of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner is that they were all severely alcoholic," Taylor notes. "Cather went from strength to strength, book after book gives pleasure. There's no falling off in her work. She was her own best self in book after book."

However, literary history is full of women whose potential was stifled either by internal or external forces (and often both) or who were confined in unhappy relationships to male partners whose achievements were allowed to flourish. Through either fate or sheer force of will, Cather rose above such challenges.

"It's a triumphant, not a sad story, the life of Willa Cather," Taylor says. "She did with her life everything she meant to do."

The classic

The enduring appeal of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is based on the true stories of Northern New Mexico Catholic clergy Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, is borne out by two new editions of the classic novel that were recently released following the expiration of its U.S. copyright in early 2023.

Penguin Random House released a new edition last November with an introduction by Colorado author Kali Fajardo-Anstine as part of its Penguin Vitae series, and just this month, the University of New Mexico Press released its own version with an introduction and notes by emeritus history professor Richard Etulain.

"For New Mexicans, this is kind of a foundational piece of fiction," says UNM Press spokesperson Don Redpath.

Dubbed "A Classic Novel of New Mexico" on its cover, the book, Redpath says, is a "quintessentially important text for a New Mexico publisher to have in print" and one the press jumped at once the rights were available. "I think that we would have published this many years earlier if public domain had allowed us to," he says.

Redpath says the publisher took the opportunity to create a more commercial or trade paperback feel with this edition's packaging. The contributions from Etulain, who taught at UNM for 22 years and is the former director of the university's Center for the American West, brought "a real level of local expertise and gravitas to that project," Redpath says.

Etulain's in-text notes, which largely provide historical context to the references the modern reader is unlikely to be familiar with, offer, Redpath says, insight "without overwhelming the text."

By contrast, the Penguin edition is designed for collectors.

Penguin Vitae is a new series of hardcover classics from the monolithic publisher. The catalog includes such standards as Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby as well as more modern classics such as Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and James Welch's Winter in the Blood. Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of a handful of titles by New Mexico authors, along with Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. (In light of his recent passing, perhaps Penguin could consider adding a title by N. Scott Momaday to the collection as well.)

Both copies are beautifully designed, Penguin's with a vibrant orange binding and illustrations of local flora and fauna on the cover and UNM's with an unmistakable facade of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi above the title and striking white-on-black title pages at the beginning of each of the nine books. The bonus content differs, with Etulain giving a scholarly analysis of the book's themes and Fajardo-Anstine a more personal take on what the book means to her as someone of Hispanic and Indigenous descent.

The author of the award-winning short story collection Sabrina and Corina and the historical novel Woman of Light, Fajardo-Anstine's own work gives voice to many of the same types of characters populating the pages of Death Comes for the Archbishop. She didn't read the novel herself until adulthood however, when she was living with her parents and picked up a copy from their bookshelf. She describes herself as being "startled into attention at seeing my own history on the page." As she writes:

"This feeling of recognition, of being glimpsed at the periphery of a great American writer's consciousness, was not an experience accustomed to me. ... Entering the world of Death Comes for the Archbishop was perhaps the first time I felt the narrative universe of my family's oral tradition converge with the novel form."

A curated bibliography she provides also seeks to expand the canon of Western work, recommending a rich sample of novels and nonfiction works focused on Native American, Black, and Hispanic experiences of the West. The suggestions also include several podcasts — clearly we aren't in Kansas (or 1927) anymore.

Etulain says Cather is one of the great Western writers, along with Wallace Stegner and Larry McMurtry, and brought a female influence to a genre that was historically male dominated.

Earlier than many other Western writers, Etulain says Cather was interested in "how environment shaped character," what would now be called regionalism. "If you understand the region and what's there, as far as environment is concerned, it will help you understand why these people are living here and the kinds of lives that they live," he says.

Both authors make mention in their introductions of the opening pages of the book's first chapter, with its mesmerizing description of the New Mexico high desert landscape as paradoxically so "crowded with features" as to be featureless. It's a description that still rings true nearly 100 years later, even with interstate highways going into town instead of dirt roads, as does Cather's clear love for the Land of Enchantment.

As Taylor notes in Chasing Bright Medusas, Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop when she was at the peak of her literary powers, having already written her famous Nebraska novels O Pioneers! and My Ántonia and won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. "It was a celebrated book when it was published," Redpath says, "and it has really never stopped being celebrated."