O Pioneers

From Chris Kraus's Introduction toO Pioneers! In her extraordinary bookWilla Cather: The Politics of Criticism, Joan Acocella describes young Cather's childhood: "No money, no privacy, no great things around her, but just a dusty prairie town . . . a mother usually sick or pregnant, and a pack of noisy little brothers and sisters" (p. 8). By all reports, in Red Cloud she was an outrageous genius-in Acocella's words, "a show-off, an explosion, a pest" (Acocella, p. 8), selecting from among the town's adults those who would be most interesting and helpful. As scholarly research into Cather's life and work has shown, she made up very little. Descendants of the "originals" on whom many Cather characters are based speak regularly to researchers and fans at the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. (No one, yet, has been identified as Alexandra's model, though it might be fair to assume that parts of Alexandra's character-her industriousness, her sense of purpose-were based on Cather's own.) Likewise, Cather's Red Cloud reputation is remembered, via stories told by grandparents, by many people in the town. Her closest childhood friends were Dr. Dammeral, the town's physician (on whom Cather based Dr. Archie inThe Song of the Lark), who once let the twelve-year-old Willa assist him with an amputation; Herr Scheindelmeister (the model for Professor Wunsch in Lark), the town drunk and sometime piano teacher, who told her stories about classical music and the lives of the great musicians in Europe; and William Ducker, a clerk in a dry goods store who taught her Greek and Latin (he appears in Lark as Johnny Tellamantez). Sometimes Ducker would invite young Willa to help him perform a vivisection in his homemade lab. When she was thirteen, Willa was given her own tiny, freezing attic room, a privilege she abused by endless reading. And then she just exploded. At fourteen, she went to the town barber, got a crew cut, and started dressing like a man. She liked to call herself "William Cather" and sometimes even "William Cather, M.D." Acocella recalls a "friendship album" kept by one of Cather's schoolmates in which "William" lists "flirting" as the trait that she admires most in women. In men, of course, it is "an original mind." Perfect misery, she wrote, was doing needlework. And perfect happiness? Amputing limbs (Acocella, p. 9). She escaped from Red Cloud thinking she'd learn exactly how to do this. Using money that her father borrowed from a friend, she took a year of prep school in Lincoln, and then signed up for the pre-med course at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. But when an English teacher got her essay on Thomas Carlyle into print with the Nebraska State Journal, she quickly changed her mind and decided to become a writer. She became coeditor of the school's literary magazine, The Hesperian, and wrote freelance articles for Lincoln newspapers. While she was still a college sophomore at age nineteen, she was invited to become a regular columnist for the State Journal. As James Woodress notes in his biography of Cather, her output during these years was astonishing. She wrote music reviews, theater reviews, feature articles, reports on the populist agrarian Chautauqua movement, and, in an article inThe Nebraska Editor, was noted as "a young woman with a genius for literary expression." Short stories she worked on in her "spare" time were published in prestigious journals in New York and Boston. She fell in love with many of the actresses she wrote about, and lavished them with champagne and clothes and jewels. For Cather as for Balzac, a writer she despised, debt was a fantastic motivator: She had to keep writing in order to pay the debts she ran up hanging out all night with glamorous people, whose luminescent presences in turn excited her and inspired her to keep on writing. By her second yearCather, Willa is the author of 'O Pioneers', published 2003 under ISBN 9781593080198 and ISBN 1593080190.