Remembering a writer who towered over the prairie
Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize and appeared on the cover of Time magazine when that meant something. She gained critical and eventual commercial success for books like ''O Pioneers!" and ''My Antonia" and wrote one of the great books of the 20th century, ''Death Comes for the Archbishop." Her work is secure in the American literary canon.
And yet she is a faint name on academic reading lists today. High school and college students usually make her passing acquaintance and then move briskly to Zadie Smith. To many, she is dated and quaint, tied indelibly to the heroic idealism of the immigrant pioneer experience on the American Plains. What she is not in this postmodern world, aside from feminist dinner parties, is in play.
Tonight, PBS's ''American Masters" reintroduces her to us in a 90-minute documentary, a solid, earnest effort written and co-produced by Christine Lesiak. Marcia Gay Harden is the voice of Cather and David Strathairn narrates -- each to good effect. The inevitable reenactment scenes from her novels are bearable. This show will be best appreciated by those already familiar with Cather because there is a fair amount of inside baseball about her writing that may flummox newcomers.
''The Road Is All" connects the dots in her life but, somehow, misses its melody. It also fails to explain in its opening why we should watch, why this woman mattered. Never mind. It becomes clear that Willa Cather was an uncompromising American original who warrants our attention.
She was born in Virginia in 1873 but tattooed by the brutal existence of frontier life. At 10, she moved with her family to a dugout home in Nebraska, and later to the town of Red Cloud. ''The country and I had it out together," she wrote. ''It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."
Historian David McCullough, a talking head on the show, notes that she was never sentimental about small-town life there: ''She knew how stifling it can be." She served notice at 14 that she would not conform to its strictures by getting a crew cut and wearing men's clothes. She read voraciously at the University of Nebraska before high-tailing it to Pittsburgh, where she was an editor at a woman's magazine.
It was there she met Isabelle McClung, daughter of a judge, with whom she developed the most important friendship of her life. Much has been made of Cather's assumed lesbianism. Whether her relationship with McClung was sexual remains unclear -- both women burned their letters -- but it was deep. Cather moved into her home. They traveled to Europe together and remained close until McClung married and later moved to Europe. (Cather, who went on to edit McClure's magazine, lived in Greenwich Village with another woman, Edith Lewis, for 35 years in what used to be called a ''Boston marriage.")
Cather was 38 before she wrote her first novel in 1912. She dropped journalism and devoted the rest of her life to her own writing. Her fiction blossomed, including short stories. She won the Pulitzer in 1923 for ''One of Ours," a World War I novel whose battle scenes, Ernest Hemingway charged, were stolen from movies. No matter. Her stature continued to grow, as did her reclusiveness.
For all of their differences, Cather and Hemingway shared the clean, spare prose of the best journalists. Her sense of place about the Plains and the Southwest is untouchable. But she knew she was no modernist. She belonged to an earlier school of writer that was overshadowed by the raw power of new voices like John Steinbeck, who chronicled the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression. For many today, ''The Grapes of Wrath" trumps ''O Pioneers!"
Cather died in 1947. If the writer remains, the woman does not. She came and went like a wraith, leaving this credo: ''The end is nothing. The road is all."
