Word: cather
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Willa Gather a "minor writer" [Aug. 13]? Unequivocally this places the reviewer, Martha Duffy, in the category of "lost lady": she has befuddled her thinking with today's hollow tomes. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop has been one of America's most enduring classics...
...Your review of the Knopf reissue of Miss Cather's A Lost Lady was fine, and I thought a shrewd appraisal of her, except that you took no note of the book's price, $7.95. It bears on a point of some interest to writers now, for the oblivion that swallowed her until now was of her own creation, due to the agreement she made with Alfred Knopf that she was never to be published in cheap editions. Tempus of course fugitted; my The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared in paperback for 250, and the floodgates were opened...
...aging and broke. That should probably be the end of the tale, but a coda finds Marian dying comfortably in Buenos Aires as the wife of a rich Englishman. It is a disastrous touch, the kind of thing that makes it hard, in the end, to take Cather seriously. Almost all her books drag on beyond their natural terminus, sometimes with two or three more stops. There is always some sentimental beneficence still to be dispensed, or worse, a moral toll to be exacted...
Though her best characters are women, Cather was wary of her sex. In The Professor's House, the melancholic hero-obviously speaking for the author-decides that Euripides spent his last years in a cave "because he had observed women closely all his life." Cather was also a prude. We are not told Marian Forrester drinks a little but merely get "the sharp odor of spirits." In My Antonia, the local lecher is obliquely indicated by the comment that he set a former housemaid up "in the business for which he had trained...
...Cather stuck by all these cosseting convictions. In an essay on fiction, she dismisses much of what has given the novel its vitality: any detail about commerce, labor, manufacturing, cooking, clothing and above all, "physical sensations." To her an artist's "power of observation was but a low part of his equipment." She unfortunately limited her own work by filtering priceless powers of observation through a kind of rigid moral nostalgia...