Dec. 7 was observed as the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It was also Willa Cather’s birthday. I missed commemorating her in some way, and that miss feels like a missed opportunity. This note, I hope, will make amends.
Several notes in this blog have been about writing, and Cather was good at making writers think about their craft.
It’s been the fashion for a generation or two to “show, not tell.” That is, a writer is supposed to give such a detailed description of a scene that the readers can see it for themselves. The writer shouldn’t tell the reader that the young, starving artists are poor. He should describe their garret and detail their dinner.
That’s been the fashion for a long time.
But, before I was born, Cather was having none of that. She wrote: “The novel, for a long while, has been overfurnished. The property-man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.”
She said that Balzac had tried to recreate Paris on paper, “a stupendous ambition — but, after all, unworthy of an artist.”
Cather had different taste. She wanted the writer to get to the heart of the drama, the conflict between people, and to leave off the elaborate setting. She liked to see a room left “as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”
The reader could use her imagination.
Much of what Cather despised is the kind of thing I like.
“If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form or journalism,” she wrote. But that’s exactly the kind of thing I like, the kind of thing I would aim at.
Cather died long before W.G. Sebald wrote The Rings of Saturn. But I’m afraid she would have given a blistering review to a book I admire. That’s one reason to read her. She makes you think again about what you’ve assumed to be true.
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