Willa Cather claimed she detested elaborate settings. She wanted writers to get to the drama. Elaborate descriptions of the setting infuriated her. She wanted to see a room left “as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”
It’s ironic that one of the great settings in American literature comes from the story “Neighbor Rosicky.” Rosicky, a Czech speaker, had left the old country and settled on a homestead in Nebraska. He’s a good man with a bad heart. His doctor and his wife have told him he must take it easy.
That winter he stayed in the house in the afternoons and carpentered, or sat in the chair between the window full of plants and the wooden bench where the two pails of drinking-water stood. This spot was called “Father’s Corner,” though it wasn’t a corner at all. He had a shelf there, where he kept his Bohemian papers and his pipes and tobacco, and his shears and needles and thread and tailor’s thimble. Having been a tailor in his youth, he couldn’t bear to see a woman patching at his clothes, or at the boys’. He liked tailoring and always patched all the overalls and jackets and work shirts. Occasionally he made over a pair of pants that one of the older boys had outgrown, for the little fellow.
While he sewed, he let his mind run back over his life.
I can see every detail of that place. Father’s Corner is better than any man cave.
By the way, I’m absolutely not marking the birthdays of literary heroes this year. But if you happen to know that Cather was born on Dec. 7, 1873, that’s your business.
• Source: “Neighbor Rosicky” is in Willa Cather, Great Short Works of Willa Cather, edited by Robert K. Miller; New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992. The quotation is on pp. 227-8. Cather’s scathing remarks about writers who overset the setting of a story are in the essay “The Novel Demoublé,” in Willa Cather, On Writing; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
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