I used these quotes in a presentation I gave on Twain and Cather at the 2009 Elmira conference. Cather likely never appreciated Twain, although she appeared to change her tune in later public statements, when it became apparent that Twain was not a passing fad. In an 1897 editorial for The Home Monthly, she states "I would rather sail on a raft down the Missouri again with Huck Finn and Jim than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in May." If she had ever read Huck Finn she might not have referred to "sailing" a raft, and mistaking the Missouri for the Mississippi has to be considered more than a minor faux pas for someone who spent much of her childhood and adolescence in Red Cloud, Nebraska, on the Republican River, a tributary of the Missouri. Later, in a 1913 interview, Cather opined "My own favorite writers? I've never changed in that respect much since I was a girl at school. There were great ones I liked best
then and still like- Mark Twain, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett."
Cather also detested overtly political, satirical or muckraking writing, preferring an "art for art's sake" orientation. Ironic because, for many years, as a writer and editor for McClure's magazine, she shared office space with Ida Tarbell, whose writing was the impetus for the breakup of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust. Finally, although Cather is born in 1873, a generation after Twain, there are traces of racism and anti-Semitism in her writing as late as 1940, in her novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
Cather was an invitee to Twain's 70th birthday celebration, one of 170 guests, but was likely invited by Col. Harvey and Fred Duneka, looking for new talent for Harpers. She later made a reference to a bedside meeting with Twain in New York, but this is likely an "exaggeration," and Twain, who made a favorable remark in 1909 of one of her poems, recorded by ABP in his biography, died two years before the publication of Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge. The notion, proposed by some writers, that Twain influenced Cather's writing, seems to be a stretcher, to put it mildly, and the 1895 comments, in which she also refers to Twain as a "blackguard," "with limited mentality," likely represent the core of her views of Twain.
Martin Zehr
________________________________
From: Dustin Zima <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 8:59 AM
Subject: Twain and Willa Cather
I am teaching My Antonia, and came across this little cutie:=20
http://www.everywritersresource.com/writingsense/2010/05/mark-twain-is-a-sl=
ob-by-willa-cather/
This might explain why Cather was not seated at Twain's table at his notorio=
us 70th Birthday Celebration. =20
Dustin Zima
Quincy University=
|
