Willa Cather's Private Letters Finally Published

Because Willa Cather burned many of her letters and left strict instructions forbidding scholars even from quoting the remaining correspondence, today's first ever publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather [Kindle] is a treasure. Editor Andrew Jewell has selected 566 letters, about twenty percent of the total, and the first question is whether or not he degayed the lesbian icon's inner life the way Knopf has degayed the book's flap copy. Last month the NYT wrote:

"The letters do not yield steamy intimate detail. But they do make clear that Cather’s primary emotional attachments were to women, while also laying to rest what the volume’s editors, in interviews, called a persistent urban legend: that of the fanatically secretive author eager to erase any record of shameful desire."

Joan Acocella, whose 1995 New Yorker essay slammed critics like Sharon O'Brien and her lesbian interpretation of letters that at the time could not be quoted, is particularly glad to have the ban lifted now that the last executor has died and the copyright passed to a Cather Trust happy to violate her wishes. Last week, Acocella wrote:

"I don’t believe that O’Brien deliberately lied (though she may have had a “cognitive bias”). Nor do I think that Cather was not homosexual. I assume that she was, in her feelings if not in her actions. (She may have died a virgin.) I base this not just on her life but also on her fiction, which very rarely represents a heterosexual relationship that has any romantic or sexual glow to it. Actually, a number of Cather’s women are seduced, attacked, or otherwise misused by men. As for happy heterosexual couples, they seem to be friends rather than anything more (this is the case with what I think are Cather’s two most beloved heroines, Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda), and / or they are old. Perhaps the happiest couple in Cather’s novels are the heroes of “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Latour and Vaillant. But they are both men: Catholic priests. Cather gives no indication that there is any sex going on there.

"The truly damaging thing about the debate over Cather’s sexual orientation was not the matter of lesbianism, however. Most of the Cather scholars I have talked to about this have told me that, long before O’Brien produced her putative proof in 1984, they had figured that Cather was homosexual. Furthermore, at that time, the gay rights movement had been going on for over a decade. To say that a person who lived in the early part of the century was an undeclared homosexual was not a big deal.

"No, the problem was that once she was tagged as a closet lesbian, it was assumed that she lived her life in fear and unhappiness. At that time, proponents of the new modes of literary analysis already believed that the very center of art—its motor, almost—was conflict, but that the conflict was hidden. You had to ferret it out, and for years critics had been doing so, with artist after artist. But Cather was a special treat, because she was an intimidating, conservative woman. To have her in the dock was like getting to interrogate J. Edgar Hoover. The critics went to work, with joy."

Reader Enzo Cerusico sent this video.

Comments

[Bob Smith]

I was an English major in college and it irritated me that we read male writers from the 20s but no Cather.

[Duncan]

It's odd that you should quote Joan Acocella on Cather, since her book was dedicated to degaying the woman. Or at least to vilifying anyone who wouldn't degay her. But I admit it's interesting to see how she's changed her tune. As far as I can tell, her new accusation -- that those critics who said Cather was lesbian assumed she lived a miserable life -- is just as false as its predecessors.