Halfway​ through Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine, a young singer called Thea Kronborg, travels to the Southwest and takes for herself a little rock room among the cliff dwellings. She is accompanied by her soon-to-be-lover Fred Ottenburg – wealthy and secretly married – but the purpose of the pilgrimage is to be alone, to think and to strengthen her voice:

Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind – almost in her hands. They were scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and colour and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of remembering. Music had never come to her in that sensuous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled with, had always brought anxiety and exaltation and chagrin – never content and indolence. Thea began to wonder whether people could not utterly lose the power to work, as they can lose their voice or their memory. She had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to another – as if it mattered! And now her power to think seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a colour, like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones outside her door; or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas.

Music, particularly as produced by the human voice, is not a mere sequence of notes. It is interpretation. It is an understanding of weight, colour, dynamics; of how, as Cather wrote in a letter to the Commonweal in 1927, ‘not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it – but to touch and pass on’.

The Song of the Lark was my initial encounter with Cather’s Southwest, a landscape she first toured in 1912 when she was visiting her brother Douglass and which recurs in two of her most monumental works, The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

The Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also offers a precursor to the two priest protagonists of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the figure of Father Duchene, who is described thus:

Long afterwards Father Duchene came out to spend a week with us on the mesa; he always carried a small drinking glass with him, and he used to fill it at the spring and take it out into the sunlight. The water looked like liquid crystal, absolutely colourless, without the slight brownish or greenish tint that water nearly always has. It threw off the sunlight like a diamond.

This is a manifestation of what, in Cather, I think of as the substance. It’s already there in O Pioneers! (1913), her second novel. Emil Bergson is in love with his married neighbour Marie; through slow inevitability, and a recent encounter at a wedding, Marie has come to love him too. Near the climax of the book, Cather gives a description of an orchard in which Marie is lying: ‘Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.’ Emil is out walking when he finds Marie ‘lying on her side under the white mulberry tree, her face half hidden in the grass, her eyes closed, her hands lying limply where they had happened to fall. She had lived a day of her new life of perfect love, and it had left her like this.’ Emil takes her in his arms. She opens her amber eyes, and he sees himself and the sun reflected there. ‘“I was dreaming this,” she whispered, hiding her face against him, “don’t take my dream away!”’

Light is the reality; even the trees are interferences. The scene is followed pages later by ‘a murmuring sound, perfectly inarticulate, as low as the sound of water coming from a spring, where there is no fall, and there are no stones to fret it’. This is the sound of Marie and Emil clinging together at last, running in their riverbed, and about to be discovered. What are the impediments that life puts in the way of love? Or are we the impediments, our rigid forms interrupting the flow of pure substance?

Cather was born​ in Virginia in 1873, and moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska when she was nine years old. Her parents, Charles and Jennie, gave her an attic room of her own and the freedom to mix with the local population, many of whom contributed to her education and would appear later in her fiction. She was the eldest of seven children; it seems she was closer to her two youngest brothers, Roscoe and Douglass, than she was to her sisters. In her adolescence, she adopted a West Point haircut and signed her letters ‘William Cather, MD’. She graduated valedictorian (out of a class of three) at the age of sixteen and attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she met the folklorist and linguist Louise Pound. She later taught high-school English and wrote for McClure’s before publishing her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), when she was almost forty. And she loved women: the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, for whom, she declared, all her books had been written, and the editor Edith Lewis, who lived with her for 39 years.

In the valley between major biographies, we often get more personal, soft-focus ones, which centre on smaller, more manageable aspects of the life and work. The late 1980s yielded three tomes in quick succession: Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (1987), James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) and Hermione Lee’s Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989). More recently, Benjamin Taylor published Chasing Bright Medusas (2023), and now Garrett Peck’s The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop has appeared. Both benefit from the newfound freedom to quote Cather’s correspondence directly, rather than paraphrasing it. Taylor provides a streamlined introduction to the writer and her work, but Peck’s book will be particularly valuable to readers interested in Cather’s Southwest writing. It offers a gentle corrective to some of the gaps, excesses and deletions found elsewhere, and I found myself in sympathy with Peck’s more modest aims. He is, at the very least, doing something constructive: taking us on a tour! Telling mild tour-guide jokes! He delights in relating lesser-known details of Cather’s six journeys to the Southwest: the dates, the itineraries, the discoveries; the historical figures and episodes on which she based characters and events; the fact that she liked to stay at Harvey Girls hotels. (It strikes me that Willa Cather/Harvey Girls erotica is an untapped market.) He includes a wide array of Native, Mexican and New Mexican perspectives, as well as having a deep base of knowledge about the Ancient Puebloans (outdatedly referred to by Taylor as the Anasazi). Best of all, Peck loses his mind over a Blue Jay notebook that Lewis bought on a trip to Taos and Santa Fe with Cather in 1925, and in which the two women took turns writing. BLUE JAY, it proclaims on the cover, above a sprightly picture of the bird, and beneath that ‘Surpassing Value’. Cather never dedicated a book to Lewis, as she did to McClung, but Peck draws attention to the inscription in Lewis’s copy of Cather’s 1927 masterpiece: ‘To Edith Lewis, who discovered the Archbishop with me.’

Edith Lewis​ claimed that the idea for Death Comes for the Archbishop came to Cather one evening when they were staying at the La Fonda Hotel in downtown Santa Fe. Cather herself said that ‘before morning, the story was in my mind. The way of it was on the white wall of that hotel room … as if it were all in order and colour there, projected by a sort of magic lantern.’ The book that inspired her was William Howlett’s Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf (1908). The historical Joseph Machebeuf, a Catholic missionary, becomes, in Cather’s telling, the homely and evangelical Joseph Vaillant, and Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of Santa Fe, becomes the more remote and untouchable Jean Marie Latour.

The book almost seems to require a password, yet it is the most universal of all Cather’s works. Two mid-19th-century French priests are dispatched to New Mexico after it is annexed by the United States and tasked with revitalising the Catholic Church there. We hear about what they eat and drink, what they love and believe. It contains other real historical figures – the frontiersmen Kit Carson and Manuel Chávez, as well as Pope Gregory XVI – and many episodes are based in fact. (Not, however, the El Greco painting that appears in the prologue, which Cather came to regret making an El Greco. She later received many letters from people convinced they had masterpieces in their attics.)

It is a book of colours. The painting on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition is marvellous: thickly laid thumb-swipes of red, ochre, blue – creating its own clouds, implying its own weather and active in the stillness. It’s by the Cochiti Pueblo artist Mateo Romero, and feels much better suited to Cather’s work than the watercolours on the covers of other editions of the novel. Peck compares the structure of Death Comes for the Archbishop to the Book of Acts; Taylor invokes Cervantes; Lee brings in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Cather herself spoke of it in terms of The Golden Legend, a collection of lives of the saints. You could also liken the experience of reading it to a physical walk through the Stations of the Cross, where each episode is assigned the same pictorial weight, though pilgrims may linger longer in front of some than others.

The true medium of this text is messages flying back and forth in tireless intercourse. The reader, like the characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand out for the scrap of paper. Cather, here as elsewhere, has the ability to build the holy object backwards from information. ‘The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced,’ she wrote of Katherine Mansfield. ‘It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.’ Such is the case with her own work. There is something redundant in writing about Death Comes for the Archbishop; scholars quote the same passages, ones of surpassing beauty that do not bear restatement. The novel must be read.

If you’re worried the book might be boring, fear not: a serial killer shows up right away and the priests are only saved by the warning of his wife, Magdalena, whom the priests first take to be ‘half-witted’. When she senses her husband’s intentions, however, she changes. ‘Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away! – two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat – and vanished.’

In another memorable scene, Kit Carson’s wife tells Latour about Trinidad Lucero, a local man who may be the son of a priest in the area, Father Martinez. Lucero is also a member of the Penitentes, a Catholic brotherhood renowned for its intense rituals of mortification:

Did you hear what happened to him at Abiquiu last year, in Passion Week? He tried to be like the Saviour, and had himself crucified. Oh, not with nails! He was tied upon a cross with ropes, to hang there all night … But he is so heavy that after he had hung there a few hours, the cross fell over with him … Then he had himself tied to a post and said he would bear as many stripes as our Saviour – six thousand, as was revealed to St Bridget. But before they had given him a hundred, he fainted … This year they sent word that they did not want him at Abiquiu, so he had to keep Holy Week here, and everybody laughed at him.

Lee calls this a ‘disgusting story’, but she wasn’t raised a Catholic. It has a matter-of-fact humour for me. I take it for granted that Martinez should have as many sons as he likes. It is, after all, only outsiders who are shocked by the excesses or laxities of priests. Last year my sister Mary texted the family group chat about a local priest who was forced to retire because he was ‘being extorted by a prostitute for 60k’. ‘Kind of a bummer,’ my brother responded. Later she clarified that the priest who was being extorted hadn’t in fact retired, but the priest working with him had, in protest. This is the sort of comedy you run across in Cather’s novel – lovelier language, but the same stories, the same politics, the same unmistakable chatter of a closely knit group’s infighting.

There’s no conflict in Death Comes for the Archbishop, except for the grinding of tectonic plates, the breaking of treaties, the murder of nations. It’s a populated novel; the land is not empty, it’s busy and has a vivid history. One of Cather’s theses, which can be traced all the way back to her earliest work, is: other people are here. Her bigotry, when it appears, stands out because in other places the reach of her sympathy is so great. On the one hand, she never questions the project of the pioneer, the destructive arc of western expansion; on the other, Latour calls ‘the expulsion of the Navajos from their country … an injustice that cried to Heaven’.

In Cather’s​ Southwest trilogy, the primitive is a state of reception: man alone in the wilderness returned to an age of childlike reverence. This is why she is open to the charge of sentimental (and unfeeling) nostalgia; it is also the reason she preserved details as carefully as someone folding away a quilt. Particular knowledge is everything. Take Jacinto, the Pecos guide who brings Latour into a cave for shelter in a chapter called ‘Stone Lips’. (Much Freudian hay has been made of this, though a normal person would probably just remark that it would make a good band name.)

A few moments later the Bishop slid after Jacinto and the blankets, through the orifice, into the throat of the cave. Within stood a wooden ladder, like that used in kivas, and down this he easily made his way to the floor.

He found himself in a lofty cavern, shaped somewhat like a Gothic chapel, of vague outline – the only light within was that which came through the narrow aperture between the stone lips.

Latour feels a marked unease in this place, which is both sacred and secret; he begins to perceive an ‘extraordinary vibration’. Jacinto tells him to lay his ear to the ground: ‘What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.’ In the night he wakes and observes Jacinto ‘standing on some invisible foothold, his arms outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his ear over that patch of fresh mud, listening; listening with supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against the rock by the intensity of his solicitude.’ The text grants us, for a moment, the gift of this supersensual ear. The substance rushes deep within the earth.

There are states of ultimate reception, and there is the adolescence of faith – mocked elsewhere, out of embarrassment, perhaps, but in Cather taken very seriously. In a section called ‘December Night’, Latour meets an enslaved Mexican woman, Sada, who is forced to work for a family of Protestants ‘very hostile to the Roman Church … they did not allow her to go to Mass or to receive the visits of a priest.’ Latour encounters her after she has slipped away from the family and ‘come running up an alleyway to the House of God to pray’.

Kneeling beside the much enduring bondwoman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth … Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart like a sword.

If the project of the pioneers is not questioned, neither is the work of the missionaries as they seek out new converts and lost Catholics. They make conquests among the people and impose their aesthetic on the land and in the imagination – even in the imagination of those far away. At one point, a young nun in France describes her joy when Vaillant’s sister, Mother Philomène, reads aloud from her brother’s letters:

After the Mother has read us one of those letters … I come and stand in this alcove and look up our little street with its one lamp, and just beyond the turn there, is New Mexico; all that he has written us of those red deserts and blue mountains, the great plains and the herds of bison, and the canyons more profound than our deepest mountain gorges. I can feel that I am there, my heart beats faster, and it seems but a moment until the retiring bell cuts short my dreams.

What is the substance of the novel? Is it the same as the substance of those letters that went winging their way between continents? Something more confidential than mere information, more intimate. The letters find their purpose during the day and their form in the firelight. There is something adult about them that assumes not just equal intelligence but common sensibility and abiding interest. Cather never doubts that we can perceive the splendour as she depicts it. They are letters home, like the letters to Philomène. One is in the land, the other in the domestic sphere; the free eagle to the nest, the home to the world. Letters from William to Willa, and back.

If it is all substance, running in its courses, could not the Holy Family appear again? In fact they do, quite late in the story, when another priest, Father Junípero, tells Latour about a little Mexican house, owned by a family of shepherds, in which he once took shelter. When the shepherd leads Junípero inside, he sees a woman stirring porridge and a child ‘scarcely more than an infant and with no garment but his little shirt … playing with a pet lamb’. What follows is one of the most quoted passages in Cather’s fiction:

There is always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to simplicity – the queen making hay among the country girls – but how much more endearing was the belief that They, after so many centuries of history and glory, should return to play Their first parts, in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor – in a wilderness at the end of the world, where the angels could scarcely find Them!

A few pages later, we are given the counterpoint to this and meet Latour again in his final days:

Scenes from those bygone times, dark and bright, flashed back to the Bishop: the terrible faces of the Navajos waiting at the place on the Rio Grande where they were being ferried across into exile; the long streams of survivors going back to their own country, driving their scanty flocks, carrying their old men and their children. Memories, too, of that time he had spent with Eusabio on the Little Colorado, in the early spring, when the lambing season was not yet over – dark horsemen riding across the sands with orphan lambs in their arms – a young Navajo woman, giving a lamb her breast until a ewe was found for it.

‘Bernard,’ the old Bishop would murmur, ‘God has been very good to let me live to see a happy issue to those old wrongs. I do not believe, as I once did, that the Indian will perish. I believe that God will preserve him.’

The novel does not end here, but on the peal of a bell, people falling to their knees, the archbishop lying in state in the cathedral he caused to be built, and which still stands today. The avoidance – and the separation, the detours, the denial, the complications – we find in the lives of the saints are also necessary ingredients of the love story. Latour does not see the Lord in his final moments; he is not visited by the Virgin; instead he has a vision of Vaillant racked by the notion that he may not be free to follow his calling.

He was standing in a tip-tilted green field among his native mountains, and he was trying to give consolation to a young man who was being torn in two before his eyes by the desire to go and the necessity to stay. He was trying to forge a new Will in that devout and exhausted priest; and the time was short.

Latour closes his eyes on green fields and the face of a loved one. The death of the archbishop is one of Cather’s natural ones, belonging to the landscape and to long time. The river flows in its courses; the murmur stops in one place and bubbles up in another; a body carried by the stream is not its entire story. Earlier in the book, Vaillant stops to watch the ‘imprisoned water leaping out into the light like a thing alive’; its escape is his escape, and he too will flash just for a moment. But someone has seen him. He has been the apparition.

There are​ two towns. One is full of lesbians who live together for forty years and the other is full of academics who are administered a small electric shock if they say the word ‘gay’. If all of Cather’s biographers were crowded into the same place, they would be understood to be suffering from some form of mass ergotism. In my reading, I so frequently encountered people stepping on rakes that I began humming the ‘You have died of dysentery’ jingle from the classic computer game The Oregon Trail whenever it happened. Nicholas Gaskill, in his otherwise excellent introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, leaves it at this: ‘Cather’s critics and biographers have long speculated about the nature of her relationship with Lewis, with whom she lived in New York City for over forty years, but they have not reached any easy or straightforward conclusions.’ It is all, in light of the facts of her life and fiction, quite mystifying. Straight people are not naming their characters Cressida Garnet, I promise.

‘I need eight hundred pages written by a gay opera singer, STAT!’ I yelled in a second-hand bookshop. ‘Preferably in the next ten days!’ None was forthcoming. The first biographical works about Cather were personal remembrances by Lewis and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, both from 1953. The first critical biography, by E.K. Brown, appeared the same year. A proscription in Cather’s will against quoting from or publishing her letters had disastrous consequences: scholars were forced to paraphrase, which produced both bizarre language and practical misreadings. Cather’s Selected Letters were published in 2013 and did not do as much to illuminate her life as we might have hoped. She reportedly burned hundreds of her letters to McClung, who broke her heart when she married Jan Hambourg. When McClung died of kidney disease in 1938, Hambourg returned the letters to Cather, who ‘cremated’ them in her apartment. It is these missing letters, of course, that speak. The effect of their deletion is that mere grumbling and mundane unpleasantness is left in place of the emotional core. ‘She can be, in modern parlance, a drama queen,’ the editors of the Selected Letters write in their introduction.

One of Cather’s most revealing letters was written to Lewis in 1936. Lee parses it as ‘a description of Jupiter and Venus seen from one of their favourite places, the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (where they would both be buried)’. This speaks for itself, but Lee is most struck by the fact that the letter concludes with Cather’s ‘praise for Edith’s packing of [her] clothes: not a wrinkle’. Lee’s readings of the work are astute, sometimes even inspired, but her treatment of the life is acid. Even something as pedestrian as shoulder pain is disbelieved. In a new preface to the book from 2017, Lee says:

There are things I would change if I were writing it now. I was evasive about Cather’s sexuality because, at the time, I found the claims for Cather as a gay icon, combined with attacks on her for not being bolder or more explicit, a distorting lens through which to read fiction that takes so much of its power from containment, selection and evocation.

In practice what this means (kind of intriguingly) is that Lee is more willing to call Cather a troll than a lesbian. Fourteen troll cites by my count, including a mention of her ‘troll friendships’.

Here’s another passage from Lee:

Cather’s ‘cross-dressing’, in her life as in her writing, was a complicated matter. She outgrew her (now notorious) youthful phase of calling herself ‘William Cather Jr’, dressing as a boy, and having passionate erotic crushes on other girls, and on actresses and opera singers, and created for herself a well-controlled, increasingly ‘private’ life as an independent professional woman, not explicitly or even admittedly homosexual, but emotionally defined by her deep feeling for one woman and her lasting companionship with another.

No. You have died of dysentery. The period of Cather ‘dressing as a boy’ begins when she is as young as thirteen or fourteen (see the photographs in the Woodress and Peck biographies) and lasts at least through university. A picture of her side by side with Louise Pound, both of them with short cuts and boyish hats, hardly supports the ‘youthful phase’ interpretation; they look like two people in a joyful, like-minded partnership, with the private language of presentation and gesture that partnership implies. They share a secret, like Hadley and Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, when she is cutting her hair shorter by inches as he grows his hair long.

We have a letter to Pound from 1892, which contains the famous (and famously misread) line: ‘It is manifestly unfair that “feminine friendships” should be unnatural, I agree with Miss De Pue that far.’ (It’s signed William.) And we have two to Mariel Gere, one of which describes driving with Pound in the countryside. Lee writes dismissively of this letter and sets the tone for its future interpretation:

There is a great deal of self-conscious ‘Bohemian’ boasting about swopping copies of Daudet’s risqué decadent novel Sapho (the story of a young man from the country hopelessly infatuated with a beguiling, corrupt, artist’s mistress) and about how ‘blue’ she is for Louise, and how Louise won’t call her ‘love’ in public, and how she’s been driving her about the country with only one hand on the reins.

While Lee insists this letter makes for ‘silly reading’, she does allow that it ‘reveals to us, for the only time, a touching mixture of bravado and anxiety about her sexuality’.

Joan Acocella, in Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000), which expanded on a New Yorker article from 1995, pounces on the academic feminists of the 1990s without specifically naming Judith Butler, whose Bodies that Matter (1993) admittedly does some pretty wild stuff with the poor rattlesnake in My Ántonia. (It was foolish enough to configure itself into the loose shape of a letter ‘W’, which might stand for Willa, women, writing, anything. Butler even conscripts Žižek to talk about the ideology of proper names – No! GET A JOB, STAY AWAY FROM HER!) But Acocella ties herself into her own knot: ‘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.’ Joan, you have fallen in a hog wallow. You have rolled down a big hill of pinto beans, and we miss you.

Taylor writes that the 1892 letter to Pound ‘is a profession of love. No other letter like it survives. Is it consciously lesbian? The answer, though not easy, is probably no.’ Lesbians have to be conscious now? Should I hide in the closets of my friends to make sure their clits are activated at all times? It is not my business to determine whether the friendships in Cather’s work are sexual – in a way, this is the point. Both The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop are books about leaving people to their private language, the shoulder-to-shoulder dialogue we see in that picture of Cather with Pound. As St Peter says, ‘My friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue.’ If you really can’t hear that current running in the earth, in the cave between the stone lips, well, not everyone does. It may be a matter of knowing where people are likely to hide things – cruets in the cave, stories within stories, love.

There is another widespread hallucination: that there is no sex in Cather’s books. You see the claim everywhere, sometimes right before a quoted paragraph where people are openly fucking. Taylor: ‘The pattern of her affective life is here being set. Sexual nature is what she intends to rise above.’ His reading of O Pioneers! includes this line: ‘In the epilogue, the full force of Cather’s antipathy to sexual love becomes apparent.’ Are we reading the same books? It is marriage that signals death in her novels, not sluttiness. As Ántonia says of Lena Lingard, ‘Lena’s all right, only – well, you know yourself she’s soft that way. She can’t help it. It’s natural to her.’ To Cather, the bad women are not the Lena Lingards; they are the women who marry men of intellect, promise and diligence – and then clip their wings and dissipate their energies.

Daudet’s Sapho, the novel mentioned by Cather in that early letter to Pound, appears again in the marvellous peeping Tom story ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ from Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). Some of Cather’s New York stories, while resembling Edith Wharton or Henry James in certain respects, are like Joseph Mitchell in others. What if she had worked for a better paper, the New Yorker rather than McClure’s? If the stories were simply hazy nostalgia for bohemian New York, that would be one thing, but they are informational, like a stacked pantry of concrete detail. They are also so sexually charged that it feels absurd to read in the biographies about sublimation and evasion and the appropriation of male perspectives. In ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’, the characters, a singer and an aspiring artist, very much go to town on each other’s holes. And the way it happens is both the way it happens in life and the way it happens in high art: ‘But the moment he put his arms about her they began to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera.’

There is a ferocious need to read Cather’s work symbolically – but her symbolic frameworks are surely less interesting than her stories. Consider another masterpiece, A Lost Lady (1923), which traces the fortunes of Marian Forrester, the glamorous wife of an ageing railroad pioneer. Marian is also an exquisite hoe. Her promiscuity is often treated as an allegory of moral decay, but isn’t she more interesting as a person than as a symbol of the decline of the West?

The novel invokes Cather’s watchword: reality. The light is the reality; Captain Forrester, Marian’s faithful and all-knowing husband, is the reality. Hoes, and those loyal to hoes, are within the natural order. Marian was based on Lyra Garber, whom Cather ‘loved very much in my childhood’, and this portrait of her is one of Cather’s most sensitive accomplishments. Marian’s physical presence is so fully woven into the narrative that the story of a climbing trip she takes as a young woman, with a man who falls to his death, comes almost as a plot twist. She breaks both legs, is found by Captain Forrester’s search party and is brought back to camp, where ‘everything possible was done for her, but by the time a surgeon could be got up from San Francisco, her fractures had begun to knit.’ It is Captain Forrester’s hand she holds, and wishes to hold, as her legs are rebroken and set. He knows what she is; he is loyal to her. As long as he is alive, he will not let her fall.

Many​ events that are treated as perverse in Cather – or as evidence of her dire turn of mind – were incontrovertible facts of prairie life. ‘Such things are not rare in Cather,’ Acocella writes:

A farmer who has lost his hogs to cholera goes home quietly and strangles himself. A hobo comes upon a group of people threshing in a field and, waving gaily at them, throws himself into the threshing machine. These events are described almost laconically – ‘The machine ain’t never worked right since,’ says a witness to the hobo’s suicide – so that their very clarity is baffling.

‘Hobo’ is Acocella’s own jaunty word. And the ‘witness to the hobo’s suicide’ is ‘Tony’ herself.

This episode appears in altered form in The Song of the Lark. This time it is Thea who has the encounter with the tramp, as he makes his way into town ‘carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening nailed over one end’. She puts a handkerchief over her nose because of his odour, and then is sorry when she sees that he notices. Later, the city water ‘began to smell and to taste’. ‘The tramp had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into 75 feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and roll of ticking.’ This scene is not meaningless grotesquerie. It is the cause for Thea to ask herself: ‘How could people fall so far out of fortune?’ How was it that she would not, and knew that she would not?

Thea is unsexed by her vocation, her ambition, her choice of lover – and also by her genius, a quality we recognise but are unable to quantify. When we are inside her consciousness, this quality is less apparent than when she is seen through the eyes of others: Ray, the railway brakeman who loves her; Doctor Archie, who first notices her talent during a house call; and others who view her almost as a natural phenomenon. The model for Thea was the opera singer Olive Fremstad, one of three performers Cather profiled for McClure’s in 1913. She was Swedish and had marvellously substantial arms. ‘Cather went to interview her in her New York apartment,’ Doris Grumbach writes in her introduction to The Song of the Lark. ‘She saw her transformed, when the opera house needed her to fill in at the last moment, from a weary, wan woman to a glittering, radiant star.’ A version of this appears towards the end of the book when Thea, who has achieved her success and whose exhaustion is now total, is called in to play Sieglinde in Die Walküre. At once, weariness transforms into fire.

‘The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification,’ Cather wrote in her essay ‘The Novel Démeublé’ from 1922. ‘The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.’ Learn to sing, then learn to unsing. Learn how to touch and pass on.

The other notable artist in The Song of the Lark is known colloquially as Spanish Johnny; his name, of course, is Juan. He is a tenor with a limited instrument but a large interpretive gift. His spells of wildness, his wife explains to Doctor Archie when he comes to treat him, arise from a particular source: the electricity of performance. ‘The saloon, doctor, the excitement – that is what makes him. People listen to him, and it excites him.’ To illustrate her point, Juan’s wife picks up one of the white conch shells with which the Mexican women border their yards. ‘Listen, doctor. Do you hear something in there? You hear the sea, and yet the sea is very far from here. You have judgment, and you know that. But he is fooled. To him it is the sea itself. A little thing is big to him.’ The listening in this remarkable scene travels both ways. Juan listens to the shell and hears the sea itself; the crowd listens to him and hears all music. Thea, who has accompanied Doctor Archie to Juan’s bedside, picks up the shell herself and hears a calling.

Air, earth, water, stone, sky – and dissolution. I am not sure if these are universally recognised as Cather’s themes, but so it is. As she writes at the end of My Ántonia,

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

When Cather died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1947, Lewis had the last part of this passage inscribed on her gravestone, along with a birthdate that made her younger by three years. She would, along with her works, be distributed; she would step into the dance of the universe. That letter to Lewis that invokes their star-watching ends with these words: ‘And now I must dress to receive the Planets, dear, as I won’t wish to take the time after they appear – and they will not wait for anybody. Lovingly W.’