The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

2.5 stars

First Sentence: Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.

Thoughts: Thea Kronborg was the daughter of Swedish immigrants living in Colorado. She wasn’t like the other girls. She had a real gift for music. Her mother always made sure Thea had lots of time to practice her piano and got her lessons from the best music teacher in the region, a dissipated German pianist named Wunsch. He had his faults, but he gave Thea a thorough grounding in the basics of music.

Because she was so devoted to her art, Thea didn’t have any friends her own age. All of her friends were older men, which is just as creepy as it sounds. Dr. Howard Archie encouraged Thea’s intellectual pursuits by letting her borrow books from his library. He took her on his house calls as well, which is how she met the Mexican immigrants in Spanish Town. She loved sitting with them at night listening to their music.

Another friend was Ray Kennedy, a railroad man who told her about the world outside Colorado. He was always talking about how he was going to marry Thea as soon as she was old enough, so it was a distinct relief when he was killed in a train wreck. He left all his money to Thea, who used it to move to Chicago to further her musical education.

The first year she studied piano under Andor Harsanyi. He soon realized Thea didn’t have any real calling to the piano, but when he heard her sing he realized it was because her real gift was her voice. He sent her to Madison Bowers to develop her vocal talents. Bowers was a good teacher but a miserable human being. Thea learned a lot from him, but she wore herself down being at his beck and call all the time.

Through Bowers she meets Fred Ottenberg, the son of a brewery mogul. He convinces Thea to spend her summer in the Arizona desert. He meets her there after a few months and they fall in love. Alas, t’was not to be just yet. Instead Fred breaks her heart before financing her further musical education in Dresden.

Ten years later Thea is in New York for the summer singing with the Metropolitan Opera. Dr. Archie, who has given up medicine and now owns several mines, comes to visit her and hear her sing. There he and Ottenberg witness her breakthrough into real artistry/stardom.

Honestly, this is not my favorite of Cather’s works. The best part was when Thea and Fred were in the desert. Cather’s true gift was describing the stark beauty of the American Southwest. Unfortunately this was a character-driven novel, not a landscape novel, and all the characters were likeable at all. Except Harsanyi, he was a good sort. All of the other men, however, were pervy creeps. As for Thea herself, she was a cold fish of a person. The novel tried to pass of her superiority complex as “artistic,” but it wasn’t. She was a spoiled brat who became a right bitch by the end of the book. The story doesn’t tell us how she turned out after her breakthrough performance, but it’s really not a mystery. She became a prima donna of the worst order. There was no other possible future for her.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

6 stars

First Sentence: One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

Thoughts: This was the book that made me fall in love with Willa Cather. If you think her descriptions of the Great Plains were wonderful, just wait until you read her descriptions of the southwestern deserts. I wanted to go to New Mexico the first time I read this and now, twenty-five years later…I still haven’t visited that state. One day. When it’s safe to travel again. After next year.* This I vow.

The Archbishop that Death is coming for is Jean Latour, a priest from Ohio who gets tapped to be the Bishop of Santa Fe. As his name suggests, he is originally from France and came to America as a missionary with his friend and fellow priest Joseph Vaillant. As soon as they got to Santa Fe, Father Latour immediately had to set out again to Old Mexico to get the papers he needed from the Archbishop there to prove to the local priests that he did have the authority he said he did. This was a long journey of nearly a thousand miles on muleback. Those old missionary priests did not mess around.

Father Latour spent the next several years uniting his See after it had been pretty much abandoned by the Roman Catholic Church for, oh, two hundred years or so. Ever since the conquistadors left at least. The locals had reverted to a lot of folk traditions which they dressed up as Catholic, which was fine by the French Fathers. They found the local rites charming. The priests, though, were a different story. There was a lot of reverting there, too, and they had to be reminded of their vows. Mainly the one about chastity. That’s the one that gets a lot of priests into trouble. We’ll just leave it at that.

The cast of characters is just as colorful as the landscape they inhabit. There’s Manuel Lujon who gifts Fathers Latour and Vaillant his two white mules that accompany them on their journeys for the next several decades. There’s also Magdalena who the Fathers rescue from an abusive husband; Jacinto, Father Latour’s native guide who knows all the best places to hide from bad weather; Padre Martinez, the wicked priest of Acoma, Doña Isabella Olivares, the gracious hostess of Santa Fe; and legendary frontiersman Kit Carson.

Cather also gives us many local legends, like the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the story of the original wicked priest of Acoma. We also get American Indian legends, like the story of what might be hidden in the sacred cave in the Pecos mountains where Jacinto and Father Latour hid during a sudden storm.

The end of things come as it always does. Father Vaillant leaves New Mexico to save souls in the mining camps of Colorado. Father Latour starts to think about his legacy and begins building a cathedral in Santa Fe. He finds the perfect stone for it in the barren hills outside the city. Much like the people’s beliefs, Father Latour understands that the buildings must blend in to the landscape and not clash with it. The cathedral gives us one of the best descriptions in the entire book:

“No one but Molny and the Bishop had ever seemed to enjoy the beautiful site of that building,—perhaps no one ever would. But these two had spent many an hour admiring it. The steep carnelian hills drew up so close behind the church that the individual pine trees thinly wooding their slopes were clearly visible. From the end of the street where the Bishop’s buggy stood, the tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-colored hills—with a purpose so strong that it was like action. Seen from this distance, the Cathedral lay against the pine-splashed slopes as against a curtain. When Bernard drove slowly nearer, the backbone of the hills sank gradually, and the towers rose clear into the blue air, while the body of the church still lay against the mountain.

The young architect used to tell the Bishop that only in Italy, or in the opera, did churches leap out of mountains and black pines like that. More than once Molny had called the Bishop from his study to look up at the unfinished building when a storm was coming up; then the sky above the mountain grew black, and the carnelian rocks became an intense lavender, all their pine trees strokes of dark purple; the hills drew nearer, the whole background approached like a dark threat.

“Setting,” Molny used to tell Father Latour, “is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.”

I drew a picture based on that description once. It has been blessedly lost to the sands of time. I am no illustrator. Fortunately Cather was, with words at least, and her cathedral picture is still with us.

*Next year’s Big Trip has already been planned. It is about as far from the southwestern deserts as you can get and still be on the same continent. Same time zone, though. Guess where I’m going and win a coveted No Prize!

**Which is clearly based on the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, which is exactly like I pictured Father Latour’s cathedral.

My Ántonia, Willa Cather

6 stars

First Sentence: I first heard of Ántonia on what has seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.

Thoughts: Jim Burden spent the first nine years of his life in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but after his parents died he was shipped off to live with his grandparents in the Nebraska prairies. Along the way he met the Shimerdas, a Bohemian family coming to make a new life in America. They ended up riding in the same wagon from the train station to the town of Black Hawk where they parted ways, Jim to his grandparents’ house and the Shimerdas to the tender mercies of Krajiek, a fellow countryman and the only one within hundreds of miles who speaks their language.

You can guess what happened next. Krajiek took advantage of the Shimerdas and kept them as ignorant as he could. All six of them were crammed in a tiny dugout house and had to try to work their farm with bad seeds and substandard tools. Fortunately the Burdens were nearby and they took pity on the Shimerdas. Mrs. Burden came over as often as she could with food and supplies and Jim taught Ántonia how to speak and read English. Even that wasn’t enough to help them through the first winter. It’s not that the Burdens’ help wasn’t enough, it was that Mr. Shimerda turned up dead in the barn one dark winter night. Officially it was ruled a suicide, but unofficially everyone suspected Krajiek. There were some mysterious injuries, you see. However it was early days for the prairie settlement and there wasn’t much of a police force in Black Hawk so Krajiek was allowed to skip town shortly after Mr. Shimerda’s funeral.

A few years later the Burdens sold their farm and moved into town. Jim enrolled in high school and made new friends in his neighborhood. Then Ántonia reappeared. Jim’s grandparents weren’t happy with the way her older brother Ambrosch made her do field work all the time and convinced their neighbors to hire her as a maid and cook. Ántonia and Jim picked up their friendship where they left off. She introduced Jim to the other immigrant girls working in town and he fell in love with them.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had “advantages” never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or well-educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they all had, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them.

Cather’s shed the puritanism that ruined the ending of O Pioneers and doesn’t punish any of the immigrant girls for thwarting Victorian mores. All of them have “reputations,” even Ántonia who falls in with a bad crowd when a dance hall opens up in town. However, all of them rise above the tsk-tsking fine ladies and come into their own. Lena Lingard, who everyone said had tempted a man away from his wife, ended up with one of the finest dressmaking establishments in San Francisco. Tiny Soderball, who everyone said was no better than she ought to be, went to the Yukon, struck it rich in the goldfields, and also moved to San Francisco where she spent her life making more money. And Ántonia, who had an illegitimate baby, married a decent man, had ten children, and owned one of the biggest and most successful farms in the county.

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.

I wish They had forced us to read My Ántonia in school instead of that Death of a Salesman crap. Who cares about the depression men face trying to live up to the American Dream? This is the real American Dream here, where a girl can come up from nothing and succeeded. We girls needed heroines like Ántonia who struggled in a dugout house and rose to owning the richest farm in Black Hawk.

O Pioneers!, Willa Cather

4 stars

First Sentence: One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.

Thoughts: This is Willa Cather’s classic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in late nineteenth-century Nebraska. But first it’s the story of the Bergson family, Swedish immigrants who are trying to make a go of farming the untamed Great Plains. It’s a difficult task that ends up killing John, the patriarch of the family. Before he dies he turns over management of the farm to his daughter Alexandra, the only one of his children who has a feel for the land and a head for farming. Her brothers Oscar and Lou agree to this because it takes the pressure off them. Youngest brother Emil is too young to have an opinion.

The years after John’s death are hard on the immigrant farmers. All the pigs in the county start dying off, so Alexandra visits Crazy Ivar, the local crazy hermit, to find out how to save her own pigs. Ivar tells her not to do what her neighbors are doing and instead to pay attention to the fact that pigs like to be clean and eat good food rather than slops. Lou and Oscar think this is crazy talk, but Alexandra gives Ivar’s advice a try and her pigs thrive. Then a drought hits and most of the farmers pack up and leave for the cities, including the family of Alexandra’s best friend Carl. Lou and Oscar want to leave as well, but Alexandra decides to look around to see what the people who are staying are doing. She decides to buy up the abandoned farms and plant alfalfa, a new crop that only one college-educated farmer is cultivating. Her brothers think this is nuts but Alexandra overrides them.

Flash forward a decade or so. Alexandra’s farm is the most prosperous in the county. Lou and Oscar are married and living on their own farms. Emil has graduated from college and trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. A new family, Frank and Marie Shabata, is living on the farm next door. Marie is one of Alexandra’s closest friends, so she decides that she and Emil should also be friends. This is a dangerous situation for several reasons: the Shabata marriage is not the happiest in the world, Marie is extremely impulsive, young, and attractive, and so is Emil. Also, there’s a white mulberry tree in the Shabatas orchard.

Alexandra might have been able to fend off the danger if she hadn’t been distracted by a romance of her own. Her old friend Carl has come back to Nebraska for a visit on his way to the Yukon gold fields. He’s tried to make a living as an engraver in the big cities but keeps being disappointed and poor. What was supposed to be a weekend stopover turns into a month-long visit with Alexandra and marriage rumors start circulating. Oscar and Lou stop by to tell Alexandra that Carl is a gold-digger in more ways than one and she’s making a fool of herself. A fight ensues and the brothers are kicked out of Alexandra’s house.

If you don’t want to know what happens at the end, move on by because I’m about to rant.

When the inevitable happens between Emil and Marie under the white mulberry tree, the inevitable happens. By that I mean Marie’s husband Frank catches them and kills them both. Here begins the destruction of Marie. Not only does she suffer horribly before she dies, but Alexandra completely forgets all of their previous friendship and blames her for the deaths. Frank was just an innocent betrayed husband. Emil was bewitched by her wiles. Marie was the villain of the piece all along.

I understand that Alexandra was devastated by her baby brother’s death, but this is taking it too far. It’s also totally out of character for her based on how she was described for the entire book. She always had sympathy for the women on the plains and was willing to fight against the men who wouldn’t listen. But once she finds out that Emil and Marie were more than friends, suddenly she forgets all of that. It’s a good thing Cather’s descriptions of the land were so absolutely gorgeous or else I would have tossed this book into the road.