Marking the day: Willa Cather

 I like reading Willa Cather’s stories. She cuts across the grain of what I was taught to do as a writer.

The style I grew up with was “show, don’t tell.” She was complaining about it before I was born.

This is from her essay “The Novel Demoublé”:

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 takes down Balzac, who tried to recreate Paris on paper: “a stupendous ambition — but, after all, unworthy of an artist.” She wants no stage setting, no lengthy descriptions. If characters are arguing in the drawing room, she wants the writer to “leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”

All this is against the grain of what I like in story and in a book.

If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form or journalism.

I don’t want to believe that. And that’s why it’s important for me, especially, to read Cather. We always need to hear the voice of the one who says we don’t have it right at all.

Willa Cather was born Dec. 7, 1873 in Gore, Va., but her family settled in Red Cloud, Neb., when she was a child. She seems like a voice of the Great Plains to me. I’m marking her birthday as a way to honor a writer who influenced me. For more on “Marking the day” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

• Sources: Willa Cather, “The Novel Demoublé,” On Writing; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. For more on her approach to writing, see “What would Willa Cather say?” Dec. 9, 2021. There are also notes on her stories “Neighbor Rosicky,” Nov. 21, 2022, and “Paul’s Case,” Dec. 10, 2021.