The Song of the Lark - Couverture souple

Cather, Willa

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0395345308 ISBN 13 : 9780395345306

Editeur : Mariner Books, 1983

Synopsis

Book by Cather Willa Grumbach Doris

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

PART I - Friends of Childhood

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

xx

 

PART II - The Song of the Lark

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

 

PART III - Stupid Faces

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

 

PART IV - The Ancient People

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

 

PART V - Doctor Archie’s Venture

I

II

III

IV

V

 

PART VI - Kronborg Ten Years Later

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

 

Epilogue

SIGNET CLASSICS

SIGNET CLASSICS

READ THE TOP 20 SIGNET CLASSICS

Born in Virginia, Willa Cather (1873-1948) moved with her family to Nebraska before she was ten. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895, then taught high school and worked for the Pittsburgh Leader before being appointed associate editor of McClure’s Magazine. Cather published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. In O Pioneers! (1913), she turned to her greatest subject, immigrant life on the Nebraska prairies, and established herself as a major American novelist. O Pioneers! was followed by other novels, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Melissa Homestead, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869.

SIGNET CLASSICS

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Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Signet Classics Printing, April 1991

eISBN : 978-1-101-00381-7

 

Introduction copyright © Melissa Homestead, 2007

All rights reserved

 

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INTRODUCTION

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure’s Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel—the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander’s Bridge—did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in the fast-paced, hothouse working and living environment of New York City, she enjoyed the company of the railroad men and of local Mexican residents. Particularly memorable for her was a trip with her brother to Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff, the site of Indian cliff dwellers’ ruins. On her way back east, she visited her family in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she had spent seven years of her childhood, and watched the wheat harvest come in.

In a strange sort of creative alchemy, her time in the Southwestern desert crystallized in her mind a way to approach the Nebraska prairies and the experiences of immigrant farm women as a subject for fiction. Thus the Arizona desert produced the novel Cather later characterized as her real “first novel,” O Pioneers!, the story of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, who tames the prairies. The time she spent in the desert also fortified Cather’s resolve to at least partially sever her ties to McClure’s—she resigned as editor, although she continued to write for the magazine for three more years. As a result of her trip to the Southwest, she had, as she wrote in 1931, “recovered from the conventional editorial point of view” and was able to write about “a kind of country [she] loved” rather than working up “interesting material” alien to her.1 As she wrote in 1928 in a copy of O Pioneers! she sent to a childhood friend in Red Cloud, “This was the first time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half read and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture.”

Critics immediately recognized O Pioneers! as powerful and original, but The Song of the Lark (1915) produced more mixed responses. On the one hand, the novel presents, like O Pioneers!, the inspiring and moving life story of a Swedish-American girl raised in the western United States. While Alexandra’s artistry is agricultural, Thea Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark, becomes an international opera star. The daughter of a minister, she grows up in a crowded house in the small town of Moonstone, Colorado. With the support of her mother and adult male friends in the community, she pursues her dream of becoming an artist. She first trains as a pianist, but in Chicago, she discovers that voice is her true instrument. After an important trip to the desert Southwest, where she comes to a deeper understanding of herself and the nature of art, she spends a decade studying and singing in Germany before returning to New York City and to acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera. However, critics (later including Cather herself) found the novel too long and questioned Cather’s inclusion of the final section, which treats Thea as a mature artist rather than as a struggling young woman.

This sense that the novel consists of two unintegrated pieces stems, in part, from Cather’s complex merging of sources. Cather was a writer, not a musician, but her künstlerroman, her novel of artistic development, clearly had its origins in her own experiences. As countless critics have observed, Moonstone, Colorado, is Red Cloud, Nebraska. A map of Moonstone drawn from verbal descriptions in The Song of the Lark would serve as an accurate map of Red Cloud, and the Kronborg house filled with seven children and Thea’s unheated attic bedroom with its rose wallpaper is Cather’s childhood home and Cather’s own room. Thea’s frustrations with her musical study and work as an accompanist in Chicago owe something to Cather’s disaffection with magazine work, and Cather transforms her own creative rebirth in Walnut Canyon into Thea’s creative rebirth in Panther Canyon.

Cather’s novel also derives, however, from her continuing ties to McClure’s after 1912 as a staff writer. In 1913, she interviewed Olive Fremstad, a Swedish-American diva, for a McClure’s article, and a friendship ensued. In Cather’s article “Three American Singers,” her preference for Fremstad over the two other singers, Geraldine Farrar and Louise Homer, is clear. American audiences may prefer Farrar and Homer, who (in Cather’s rendering) achieved their success early and easily, but Cather praises the immigrant Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American. As Roosevelt once said, Americanism is not a condition of birth, but a condition of spirit.”2 “Sheer power of will and character” define Fremstad’s spirit for Cather: “Circumstances have never helped Mme. Fremstad. She grew up in a new, crude country where there was neither artistic stimulus nor discriminating taste. She was poor, and always had to earn her own living and pay for her music lessons out of her earnings. She fought her own way toward the intellectual centers of the world. She wrung from fortune the one profit which adversity sometimes leaves with strong natures—the power to conquer.” The story of Fremstad’s early life as described by Cather in “Three American Singers” resembles only slightly Thea’s life in Moonstone and Chicago, but Thea’s spirit resembles Fremstad’s. Despite Cather’s later denials that the novel had any relation to Fremstad’s life and career, Fremstad’s ascent as the greatest Wagnerian soprano of her age clearly inspired the latter sections of The Song of the Lark.

In 1931, Cather reflected on The Song of the Lark and critical responses to it. She recalled British publisher William Heinemann’s refusal to publish an edition because “he thought ... I had taken the wrong road, and that the full-blooded method, which told everything about everybody, was not natural to me and was not the one in which I would ever take satisfaction.”3 Indeed, at nearly 150,000 words and 490 pages, the novel was nearly twice as long. as O Pioneers! and twenty thousand words longer than her second-longest novel, One of Ours (1922). In 1915, an anonymous review in the New Republic, probably by Randolph Bourne, one of the most sensitive and sympathetic readers of Cather in the teens, similarly criticized the novel’s excess, as well as its bifurcation. Contrasting the earlier sections of the novel with the latter, the critic intuited the autobiographical origins of Thea’s youth and the external origins of her professional career: “Miss Cather would perhaps be shocked to know how sharp were the contrasts between those parts of her book which are. built out of her own experience and those which are imagined. Her defects are almost wholly those of unassimilated experience. The musical life of this opera singer who has so fascinated her she has admired, but she has not made it imaginatively her own. She has contented herself with the fascination and has not grasped the difficulty of reading herself into this other life and making it so much her that the actual and the imagined are no longer separable.” 4 In 1932, in a new preface to the novel, Cather echoed (perhaps deliberately) the judgments of this review. “The chief fault of the book is that it describes a descending curve,” she wrote; “the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way.’ ” When she revised The Song of the Lark in 1937 for a collected edition of her novels, she cut nearly seven thousand words, most of them in the final two sections and the epilogue (this Signet Classics edition presents the longer 1915 text).

These judgments have become critical truisms, but they also evidence a discomfort with Thea’s singing as a career, with art conducted aggressively as a business. For late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century critics, the most compelling section of the novel has been the Panther Canyon section. Although the section concludes with Fred Ottenberg enjoying the canyon with Thea, for months, she spends her days alone in the canyon, climbing its walls, bathing in its streams, and lying inside the cliff dwellers’ houses in a state of semiconsciousness, activities that Cather describes in lush and sensuous language. Contemplating the pottery shards that testify to the artistic sensibility of the Indian women who lived in the canyon a thousand years before, Thea comes to see herself as part of a female artistic lineage in which creativity is located in the female body: “The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.... In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.” For many critics, Thea’s epiphany is a powerful corrective to a masculinist aesthetic tradition, which aligns creativity with maleness and transcendence (a tradition which Cather herself, as a young journalist reviewing books and performances, loudly proclaimed). Others have pointed to the problematic nature of Thea’s imaginative and physical appropriation of the artifacts of native culture, a dynamic that recurs in the story of Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1925)—Thea conveniently claims the absent cliff dwellers as her forebears while ignoring their living descendants nearby and the long history of conflict between European and Native Americans in the Southwest.

Both critical approaches to the novel trouble the notion that art and the artist are purely transcendent. On the one hand, Thea’s art is grounded in the body, and on the other hand, it depends upon Thea’s appropriation of native culture and artifacts. However, such an intense focus on Thea in the canyon and on the supposedly more autobiographical portion of the novel has left Thea’s professional career more often apologized for than analyzed. Cather expressed regret for making a great artist “somewhat dry and preoccupied. Her human life is made up of exacting engagements and dull business detail,”4 but this statement of explanation and apology is telling. Is the life of the artist a succession of epiphanies, of moments of transcendence, such as take place in Panther Canyon? Or is it a life of “engagements and dull business detail”? Can the two ultimately be separated, or is the artist who hopes to have an audience necessarily entangled in the messy, quotidian details of the market?

Business and finance are never entirely absent from the novel or the life of its heroine. Thea’s parents have limited means to support their large brood of children, and Thea begins earning her own way at age fourteen by teaching piano. In Chicago, she first supports herself as a church vocal soloist, and after she starts training as a singer, she works as her teacher’s piano accompanist. Despite this grounding in economic realities, Cather oddly detaches Thea’s early life from larger economic forces by placing Moonstone in the midst of desert sand hills. Although the town of Moonstone resembles the town of Red Cloud, Moonstone lacks Red Cloud’s economic reason for being. Red Cloud, a town of nearly two thous...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Perhaps Willa Cather's most autobiographical work, The Song of the Lark charts the story of a young woman's awakening as an artist against the backdrop of the western landscape. Thea Kronborg, an aspiring singer, struggles to escape from the confines her small Colorado town to the world of possibility in the Metropolitan Opera House. In classic Cather style, The Song of the Lark is the beautiful, unforgettable story of American determination and its inextricable connection to the land.

"The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway." -- Leon Edel

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Mariner Books
• Date d'édition: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0395345308
• ISBN 13: 9780395345306
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 456