A Writer Moves West, Part 3: Intimate History

In 1987 I moved back to San Francisco for good. I did some mining in the public library and found a book that helped me catch up with what I had missed in Western literary history: Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 by Kevin Starr. Through Starr I learned that San Francisco had already been a literary center during its Mexican days, when several Spanish-language literary magazines flourished. With its natural, warm-weather port, San Francisco has always stayed open to the world, attracting a curious, creative, and diverse population.

I also came to understand from reading Starr’s book how very remote the West of the U.S.A. was from the world’s urban cultural centers before the building of the transcontinental railroads and the Panama Canal. The Golden Spike connected the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869. Before that, getting from the East Coast of the United States to San Francisco, for instance, was an arduous and risky journey. Whether you traveled overland or by sea, the trip lasted several months. By sailing ship, the journey involved going all the way around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. At the time the California Gold Rush began in 1848, San Francisco, the most populous city on the West Coast, had all of 1,000 souls. 

San Francisco in 1851

The relatively sparse population of the West in the early years of European settlement was brought home to me very personally during my first few years in San Francisco when I used to walk my daughter to the school bus for first grade. There was a woman who always waited with her son at the same bus stop at that time in the morning, and naturally we got to chatting. It turned out she was from Nebraska. Growing up in Manhattan, I knew almost no one from Nebraska, and what little I knew about that state I had learned mostly from reading the wonderful novels of Willa Cather.

“Well, I don’t know much about Nebraska,” I confessed to the parent at the bus stop. “But I do know that Willa Cather was from a town called Red Cloud.”

“I’m from Red Cloud,” she answered.

“I know Cather wrote about some of the town’s most famous citizens, especially in the novel A Lost Lady,” I enthused. “Wasn’t one of the main characters based on a former Nebraska governor who lived in that town?”

“That was Silas Garber,” she said. “He was my great-great-uncle.”

Silas Garber

Now, you could write this off as a weird coincidence, but I’m telling you, this would not happen at a bus stop in Manhattan. There are just too many people in New York City for the one person you meet by chance to be closely connected to the one character you mention in a novel.

What that encounter taught me about the West is that it has grown remarkably quickly into a population center, and that it retains a relatively recent memory of the time when it was only stippled with small towns. Unlike Manhattan, downtown San Francisco is still only an hour away from untouched forest. Human beings and human settlements are far from the only show around, just about anywhere you go in the West. And the connections between past and present are sometimes remarkably fresh and surprising intimate. 

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Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 3: Willa Cather

I love the work of Willa Cather. I was introduced to her books by the children’s writer Marilyn Sachs, who pointed out to me that Cather is much deeper than the feel-good chronicler of the American West that middle school kids encounter when assigned My Ántonia or O Pioneers! Both of those are good novels by Cather, but they don’t compare with her more mature books such as A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House.

                                                   Willa Cather (1873–1947)

Cather was a late bloomer as a fiction writer. She earned her living during her early decades writing for, and then editing, women’s magazines. She didn’t really hit her stride as a novelist till she was in her fifties in the 1920s (a good lesson for those of us starting our writing projects later in life). Her work grew darker and more complex in that decade. You have to read all her books to get a sense of her incredible mastery of character, plot, and description.

She has an amazing eye for the unique characters and landscapes of the American West. Here’s a description from The Song of the Lark, one of her most autobiographical books: “Every rabbit that shot across the path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway thought, a message that one sent into the desert.” The topography is so specific to the West, and yet conveyed in a way that any reader can visualize.

Her descriptions are like portraits by a great painter: “Frizzy bangs were worn then, but Mrs. Kronberg always dressed her hair in the same way, parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back from her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in two thick braids. It was growing grey about the temples, but after the manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had taken on a colour like that of English primroses.” I love the primroses! This portrait gives you a strong sense of a woman who takes pride in herself without needing to be trendy, a woman who is not young, but is worthy of our attention. This passage is also from The Song of the Lark.

Cather certainly knows her characters, their quirks, and their beauty. Here’s her description from the same novel of Ray Kennedy, a railway worker: “Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and kindly—perhaps the chief requisites in a good storyteller.” Tells us a lot about Cather’s own values as a writer. She goes on to describe Ray’s background: “Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had, almost from the time he ran away, tried to make good his loss. As a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary.” What a great verb there, “worried”!

But there’s more: “By the light of many campfires he had pondered upon Prescott’s histories, and the words of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book agent.” No detail is without purpose. Every morsel of information tells how this man without means educated himself, and applied his keen mind to all he read. She tells us also about the complexity of Ray’s thoughts, and how knowledge was a two-edged sword for him: “Ray was a free-thinker, and inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was braking down on the Santa Fé, at the end of his run he used to climb into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll’s speeches and The Age of Reason.” Robert Ingersoll was a nineteenth century abolitionist and agnostic orator who delivered the eulogy at Walt Whitman’s funeral: “Whitman announced the gospel of the body,” said Ingersoll. The Age of Reason is Will Durant’s history of the Enlightenment. Even though Cather is creating a regional Western landscape, she is dealing with the larger issues of the day.

Cather’s novel A Lost Lady is also remarkable. The book has one of the most convincing male narrators any female author has ever created. Halfway through the plot, the reader has one impression of the main characters, for good reasons. Cather then turns the tables upside down, and by the end of the book, the reader comes to exactly opposite conclusions, also for good reasons. In The Professor’s House, published in 1925, she wrote about the Anasazi Indians with as much sympathy and understanding as any person of European descent has ever done. I can’t stop reading Willa Cather, because I can’t stop trying to absorb the many lessons that her books hold for writers.

I'm excited that the letters of Willa Cather, long unavailable, have recently been published. More writing by this great author, so long after her death, is great news.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer