Sarah Fedirka
Department of English
Arizona State University
Willa Cather’s biography would make a compelling E! True Hollywood Story (THS). Born in 1873, the Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist was, at age ten, transplanted from her home in Virginia to the Nebraska plains, the vastness of which, she wrote, overwhelmed and “erased” her. At 22, she moved to Pittsburgh, where she met Isabella McClung, the love of her life and muse. McClung would later marry and move to Europe; Cather remained behind. Eventually, Cather took on New York, becoming managing editor of McClure’s and one of the most powerful women in American publishing. She left McClure’s to write full-time, authoring (among other novels) A Lost Lady, My Ántonia, One of Ours, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. One also can imagine the THS producers capitalizing on her youthful cross-dressing, the on-going debate regarding her sexuality, and her bequest that any of her surviving correspondence be burned.
Perhaps because the True Hollywood approach to biography has become so culturally pervasive, the intelligent and beautifully produced American Masters presentation “Willa Cather: The Road Is All” feels flat. What a shame. Cather was a woman who lived and wrote with great passion. Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia, describes “his” Ántonia as having “that something which fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture.” Cather’s novels, with their nuanced prose and painterly images, themselves “fire the imagination.” Within her fiction she attempted to capture what she called “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named”—that is, “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there.” One can feel this presence in her work: can it be translated to a television biography—even a PBS one? The producers of “The Road Is All” try, particularly in the richly staged dramatizations of scenes from her novels. The program comes closest in its recreation of the sun on the plow scene from My Ántonia—perhaps because here Cather blurs the literary and visual, creating “picture writing” in the image of a black plow silhouetted “against the molten red” Nebraska sun.
Unquestionably, “The Road Is All” is informed biography. Contributors include Susan Rosowski and Joseph Urgo, two respected Cather scholars. Also interviewed is Joan Acocella, whose Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000) provoked debate among Cather scholars when published. However, in telling Cather’s story, these individuals fail to convey what elsewhere they have demonstrated to be a personal passion for her work. More compelling is the montage of photographs illustrating Cather’s life. One is drawn to her bright eyes and beguiling smile, and seeing her among other literary greats at the Algonquin Hotel answers charges that she is a writer of only regional importance. In fact, the biography does a fine job arguing that Cather warrants critical attention both for her own writing and her work at McClure’s. While little is made of Cather’s contributions to or place in American literary modernism or her problematic view of the American west as a “new Eden,” “The Road Is All” is a solid introduction to Cather’s life and work. For the imagination truly to be fired by what she has written of the “red deserts and blue mountains, the great plains…and the canyons,” however, one must turn off the television and be turned on to her novels.
For more on Cather, consider
Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000.
Cather, Willa. The Kingdom of Art. Ed. Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.
. Not Under Forty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Reynolds, Guy. Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. London: Macmillan, 1996.
Rosowski, Susan. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
Urgo, Joseph, and John Murphy, eds. Willa Cather and the American Southwest. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002.
American Masters "Willa Cather: The Road is All"airs Wednesday, September 7 at 8 p.m. on Channel 8.
"UNQUESTIONABLY, "THE ROAD IS ALL" IS INFORMED BIOGRAPHY."
