Silences (29 page)

There is a postscript. Another
“master,” another decisive letter. Sara Orne Jewett (of the classic
Country of the Pointed Firs
) whose work Cather treasured for, among other qualities, “revealing in ordinary country people the treasure of life and feeling that lay below the pinched surfaces.” Jewett befriended Cather in the constricted years, believed in her, and it was her letter (partially quoted in “One Out of Twelve”) with
its concern that Willa Cather quit
McClure’s Magazine,
manage “time and quiet” to “perfect her work . . . write life itself,” which reread in print when the Jewett letters were issued after her death in 1911, gave Cather the “courage” (confidence) to fight again for writing circumstances, again began writing her “reality”—its first flowering,
O Pioneers.

William Blake (1757–1827)
^▴

            
About 1807–1827, in the “years of obscurity,” and the last years.

            
Class reasons, and the repressive times.

Jane Austen (1775–1817)
^▴

            
The years 1800–1811.

            
Woman reasons: she was powerless in all major decisions deciding her life, including the effecting of enabling circumstances for writing.

If the acknowledged great in
achievment, possessing inner confirmation of their achievement; sometimes the stout retainer of habituated productivity and/or outside recognition as well, can be silenced—what, inescapably, does this bespeak of the power of circumstance?

What does it explain to the rest of us of possible causes—outside ourselves—of our founderings, failures, unnatural silencings?

▴
SILENCES, PP
. 6–7

*
Mostly from
The Life of Thomas Hardy,
ostensibly by Florence Emily Hardy, but actually dictated, or selected from notebooks and letters, by Hardy himself (except for the account of the last of his life).

*
Hardy’s “Candour in English Fiction.”

▴
SILENCES, P
. 7

*
There is strong parallel between Hopkins and Emily Dickinson; both almost unpublished in their
lifetime; both among the most original and greatest poets of their time; both obsessed by fame which they knew rightfully belonged to them (fame as Hopkins defined: “recognition belonging to the work itself”); both reaching out and clinging to the few recognized persons in letters who took them seriously, accorded them response. Obloquy continues to be heaped upon Thomas Wentworth Higginson (in my
view, undeservedly) in regard to not getting Dickinson published—none upon Bridges, who became Poet Laureate of England. In addition to what becomes evident in the correspondence quoted here, Bridges waited twenty-nine years after Hopkins’s death to begin to publish the poems, and then, in an apologetic and patronizing preface, expounded on Hopkins’s “bad faults.”

*
From “To seem the stranger
lies my lot, my life.”

**
From “Thou art indeed just, Lord.”

▴
SILENCES, PP
. 7–8

▴
SILENCES, P
. 9

*
“The ‘novel of the soil’ had not then come into fashion in this country. The drawing room was considered the proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart people and clever people . . .” —Willa Cather, “My First Novels,
There Were Two.”

*
Cather became so ashamed in this time of
The Troll Garden
that she hid its existence. When her friend Elizabeth Sargeant
(Willa Cather: A Memoir)
heard of it, and asked for a copy to read, Cather refused, dismissing it as “unfledged stories.” Cather “would say disparagingly, ironically [to her], that she could never write stories of Nebraska—Swedes and Bohemians were just a
joke in New York—everybody would laugh.”

Years later, in “My First Novels, There Were Two” (1931), Willa Cather reiterated this: “
O Pioneers
was set in Nebraska, of all places. As everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly
déclassé
as a literary background.
O Pioneers
was not only about Nebraska farmers, the farmers were Swedes! Since I wrote
O Pioneers
for myself, I ignored all the situations and
accents that were then thought to be necessary.”

▴
SILENCES, P
. 8

▴
SILENCES, P
. 8

SILENCES—ITS VARIETIES

                  
And now in age I bud again,

                  
After so many deaths I live and write;

                  
I once more smell the dew and rain,

                  
And relish versing. O my only Light,

                  
It cannot be