The Old Sod

By Martha Duffy

A LOST LADY by WILLA CATHER 177 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Willa Cather was born 100 years ago. This novel, reissued in a handsome centenary edition, first appeared in 1923 when the author was 50 and doing her best work. H.L. Mencken had called her a great novelist. Edmund Wilson, a young whippersnapper in those days, conceded that she was one of the few who could bring "distinction" to the Middle West: "that meager and sprawling scene." Not even he was aware that at that very moment the post-World War I generation--Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner--were sealing the door on Cather's kind of reverent regionalism.

Today, like Ellen Glasgow and Sherwood Anderson, Cather has her own persistent following. In addition, students are still required to read the chaste historical novels Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock in high school English classes. Many sound things can be learned from Cather. Her writing was almost always serene and poised, and she had the ability--which perhaps cannot be taught--of making her prose move as fast as the action she was describing.

When Willa was eight, her family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. She considered those early years in the newly settled state the most important of her life. In 1880, Nebraska was still a pioneer society. Most people lived in sod houses. So many settlers from Scandinavia and Bohemia were arriving that Willa could go for days without hearing English spoken outside her house. She was wildly excited. To her, the prairie grass looked as if it were running; it seemed possible to hear the corn growing in the summer night. In the next eleven years, the frontier was to vanish. "The great-hearted adventurers" who opened the West were replaced by men "trained in petty economies." When Cather began to write, it was already with powerful nostalgia.

Spirit of Freedom. A Lost Lady is typical of the kind of prairie pastoral Cather did best. Through the eyes of a boy named Neil Herbert, it tells of the Forresters, a couple whose fortunes are tied to the railroads. Their house outside Sweetwater--one of the many fictional names Cather gave to her own town of Red Cloud--is known "from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere." Neil is enchanted by young Marian Forrester. She wears the only earrings he has ever seen, allows herself a little wit and more than a little sherry.

Her much older husband says little but his manners are impeccable, as are his dealings with the men he employs. When he dies after a hard illness, his wife coarsens and compromises herself. Her house is now the gathering spot for a group of sharp young traders, part of a new generation "who had never dared anything, never risked anything, and who would root out the great brooding spirit of freedom."

They desert her when she is aging and broke. That should probably be the end of the tale, but a coda finds Marian dying comfortably in Buenos Aires as the wife of a rich Englishman. It is a disastrous touch, the kind of thing that makes it hard, in the end, to take Cather seriously. Almost all her books drag on beyond their natural terminus, sometimes with two or three more stops. There is always some sentimental beneficence still to be dispensed, or worse, a moral toll to be exacted.

Though her best characters are women, Cather was wary of her sex. In The Professor's House, the melancholic hero--obviously speaking for the author--decides that Euripides spent his last years in a cave "because he had observed women closely all his life." Cather was also a prude. We are not told Marian Forrester drinks a little but merely get "the sharp odor of spirits." In My Antonia, the local lecher is obliquely indicated by the comment that he set a former housemaid up "in the business for which he had trained her."

Cather stuck by all these cosseting convictions. In an essay on fiction, she dismisses much of what has given the novel its vitality: any detail about commerce, labor, manufacturing, cooking, clothing and above all, "physical sensations." To her an artist's "power of observation was but a low part of his equipment." She unfortunately limited her own work by filtering priceless powers of observation through a kind of rigid moral nostalgia.

As with many minor writers, her strength can be found in her weakness. She believed passionately in the old values of probity, discretion and charity, though she would probably have lumped them all under one of her favorite words: sanity.

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