In July 1896, Willa Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere from Pittsburgh: “I have only been a few hours in this City of Dreadful Dirt, so you must not take my first impressions seriously I feel like being funny. I began to feel good as soon as I got east of Chicago. When I got to where there were some hills and clear streams and trees.”1 Chicago, for Cather, was a place in between the plains of Nebraska and New York. Instead of joining the artists, critics, and writers who were consciously thinking about American literature and Chicago’s place in it, she passed through Chicago, moving further east, first to Pittsburgh and then to New York. She would stop in Chicago sometimes as much as four times a year to change trains, visit dear friends, and sell books. Her perceptions of the city came from reading voraciously about the city, staying in it, and from friends who were at the center of the Chicago arts scene: the Tribune journalists and then literary editors Elia Peattie and Fanny Butcher and Irene Miner Weisz from back home in Red Cloud. The friendships with Peattie and Butcher began as professional relationships that evolved into friendships with two very different women who held the same job at different times. Miner Weisz was not part of the literary world in Chicago and Cather treasured their friendship, happy to have one connection that was completely outside the world of commerce and from home.
This chapter’s first section will chronicle Cather’s relationship with Elia Peattie, which began in Omaha, Nebraska, and continued after the Peatties moved to Chicago and became a central part of the literary and arts scene. The second section gives an extended reading of Cather’s novel The Song of the Lark (1914) and argues that the novel is an extended critique of the Chicago scene that expects art to be useful (whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life), treats art as business, and destroys artists by using them. The novel should be read as Cather’s explanation for why she can never move to or settle in Chicago, despite the friends she has and keeps there. The last section shows Cather’s professional relationship to the Chicago Tribune’s art critic Fanny Butcher. Butcher loved and had a sophisticated understanding of the commercial aspect of writing and she helped Cather sell books in Chicago and across the county, but Cather’s letters to and about Butcher reveal her continued exhaustion with Butcher’s Chicago methods and ideas that made art into a business.
Elia Peattie and Willa Cather’s embrace of the modern
Willa Cather met Elia Peattie when she worked at the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska. Peattie had moved to Omaha in 1888 from Chicago, with her husband Robert, who was also a reporter. Her family moved to Chicago from Michigan in 1876, when she was fourteen and she became the Tribune’s first “girl reporter” in 1885. She married Robert in 1883 and when they moved to Omaha, her writing took a profound turn toward fictional and realistic renderings of the frontier with a particular emphasis on those issues pertinent to women: suffrage, domestic troubles, and the plight of children. She also wrote long, uplifting pieces on the beauty of the United States. In 1889, she wrote a pamphlet for the Northern Pacific Wonderland series touting the amazing splendor of Alaska for women travelers and wrote the 700-page The Story of America that same year. She published regularly in popular magazines like Lippincott’s and Cosmopolitan. Her writing began to win her prizes and she took advantage of her popularity by earning extra money on the side lecturing on literary topics that would elevate the listener.2
She met Cather in 1895 after giving a lecture on Sidney Lanier, the Southern essayist and poet. Cather had just graduated from the University of Nebraska that June and she quickly took to Peattie. In 1895, Peattie had just written a history of Nebraska women journalists, for the Nebraska Press Association, which would appeal to Cather and she praised Cather’s literary criticism as “clever, original, and generally just.” In a column later that year, she predicted Cather’s literary success, naming her opinions as “original, often dogmatic.” Cather would write to her friend Kate Cleary in 1905 that no one had been so consistently kind to her in her career and that Peattie had a very large influence on Cather’s own writing.3 Peattie inspired Cather, in part, because she was a successful woman in the masculine-identified profession of journalism, a field Cather took up briefly. In 1896, the Peatties moved back to Chicago and became part of the artistic club scene as members of the newly formed Little Room. M. Catherine Downs has claimed that Peattie had to leave Nebraska “to escape her colleagues’ jealousy,” and the collegial support of Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and Hamlin Garland must have been a relief for her.4
Cather visited Peattie in Chicago almost immediately. She wrote to Mariel Gere around September 19, 1897: “Mrs. [Elia] Peattie entertained me delightfully in Chicago, and there are a lot of nice things to tell you, but I’m not in the mood for that tonight.”5 She continued to visit the Peatties in Chicago over the next few years while she lived in Pittsburgh. She enjoyed the trips to Chicago so much that she wrote home to Dorothy Canfield on October 10, 1899:
Say, do you know it isn’t half bad to be back. I had a good trip and spent a most delightful day with the Peatties in Chicago … Mrs. Peattie has at last arrived, so to speak, for her story “The Man at the Edge of Things” in the September Atlantic is literature, as good as most modern French things and as elusive and artistic. She wants me to go to Chicago in the spring, and I think I shall. Dooley says there is no woman doing newspaper work there now that I need be afraid of. I guess he and the Peatties will make the venture safe.6
Flush with the excitement from her good trip, Cather was considering a move to Chicago to be a journalist because the Peatties were encouraging her to do so and could give her a friendly introduction into its literary scene. She never moved and never again brought up the possibility of moving to the city in her letters or journal entries. In 1901, Peattie became the literary editor of the Tribune and she could have changed the trajectory of Cather’s career. Cather, however, stayed away from Chicago, and by 1903 Cather would associate Chicago with the draining commercial work that pulled her away from her literary efforts.
On March 28, 1903, she writes to Canfield:
I don’t know when I have been so beaten out with mental effort and so sick with disappointment. … You see, Dorothy, those wretched tales went back on me. When I got my Chicago mag. work off my hands and came to the pruning and fixing of that set of short stories I just fainted by the wayside. There is weeks of work to be done on them.7
Cather will continue to associate Chicago with commercial work and its draining effects on artists. On June 4, 1911, she writes to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about a kind of moral furor that she associates with Chicago, one that’s equally as draining as the commercial work that she complained about to Dorothy Canfield:
One of the Hull House women came to the office yesterday. She said that Miss Wyatt has given herself over wholly to the cause of the White Slave; that she never talks or thinks about anything else, and feels pretty bitterly toward those of us here who didn’t sympathize with her. I’m sorry. I’ve seldom been more disappointed than I was when I found that we had no possible point of contact. She seems to me to be maddened by having lived too long in the company of a horrible idea—like Electra. She used to frighten me.8
Peattie, with her connections to Hull House, perhaps becomes associated with this kind of Chicago moral furor, for Cather. It would have been distasteful to the writer who wrote sympathetically of men and women who drank too much and had what Chicagoans would have considered moral failings.
Cather loses touch with Peattie over the next decade. By the time she begins to conceive of The Song of the Lark, she writes about her as someone she used to know. She tells her friend, the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, on June 15, 1912: “I’m so glad to hear of Mrs. [Elia] Peattie’s daughter, and trust she is happy. Her mother was so kind to me long ago.”9 The final mention of Peattie by Cather in the archived letters is in a letter sent to her good friend Irene Miner Weisz in 1913. “Willie” sends a short note: “Needless to say I’m not responsible for this! It’s rather wild, but it may amuse you.” She enclosed a copy of Peattie’s review of her new book, O Pioneers (1913), from the Tribune.10 The review praises the book effusively, declaring: “A new story has appeared which has a right to be ranged upon the shelf with the best of those written upon the subject of the western plains and the people.” She claims that the book contains “the essence of life itself.” And that “it is the power to instill this quality in her work that forces the critic to accord Miss Cather something which can be described as no other word save genius.”11
However, the last paragraph identifies the difference between Cather’s work and that of the earlier generation of realists that Peattie so admires. Peattie declares:
Yet, frankly, the book stops short of greatness. It scintillates with implications of power, but the genuine consummation is not there. The book glitters with ore, but the big pay streak does not appear. Is it that the characters, though so interesting, are not strong enough? Should there have been more struggle? Would it have been better if Miss Cather had stepped out of her story now and then and turned upon the scene and the characters the eye of the commentator and the philosopher?12
It seems that Peattie wants Cather to be more like those Chicago writers, such as Garland and Fuller, who William Dean Howells praised for their keen eyes and voices that cut through the description on the page. Peattie’s criticism of Cather needs to be read within the context of the censorship of the Scandinavian Exhibit held at the Art Institute in 1913 and the general reaction to the Armory Show held three months later. The Art Institute removed the painting “Summer Days,” by the Norwegian Bernhard Folkestad, for “moral reasons,” and the Tribune reported mixed reactions to the censorship while focusing on the embarrassed and scandalized women who viewed the painting.13 The Armory Show introduced Chicago to modernism, and Chicago press thought the exhibit fun but having no intrinsic or real artistic merit.14 Elia Peattie’s review of O Pioneers serves to announce her own hostility to the new modernism and the elements she dislikes about Cather’s work most illustrate Cather’s move into this new art movement.
Five years after Peattie publishes her review of O Pioneers, she can no longer get published. Joan Stevenson Falcone points out that
the primary reason is that she could not adjust her conservative/genteel ideologies to accommodate the new morals of the changing times. When the second wave of the Chicago Renaissance replaced the “genteel tradition,” the populace lost interest in her writings. While early in her career her works had been “too radical” they were now considered “nauseatingly virtuous” in comparison to Theodore Dreiser and others.15
Her writing took not just a strong stance against the new modernism, but a solid stance on sex in literature. She lost favor with the new male critics who saw her as a provincial and strident Chicago writer and bluestocking from an earlier generation.16 She even comes to despise Garland, who shares her dislike of naked women and sex in literature. She sees him as selling out to the “juvenile taste of America,” and, in order to sell his works, had abandoned the “austere and tragic qualities of Main Traveled Roads” producing an “innocuous sort of material” that had wasted his “vigorous and heroic talent.”17 Cather drifts away from Peattie just as she begins to experiment with modernist themes and techniques in her own writing. Cather’s next novel, The Song of the Lark, is a sharp and cutting critique of Chicago’s provincialism and anti-modernist stance, which Cather would have thought was most apparent in its citizens’, artists’, and journalists’ responses to the Armory Show of 1913.
Willa Cather’s critique of Chicago: The Song of the Lark
When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark (1915), she wrote a well-informed critique of the Chicago she came to know well through her friends and visits to the city. The novel serves as an explanation for why she never settles in Chicago and reveals her attitudes toward the city’s artists, who she knew and with whom she corresponded, but never joined. On February 4, 1937, she sent a letter to her friend, the Tribune’s literary critic Fanny Butcher, commiserating about a painful illness she had while writing the novel. She writes of her experience with a “pernicious carbuncle on the back of her head” and reveals:
I put off the operation because I was red hot into the Chicago part of The Song of the Lark and simply would not go into a hospital. All the best part of that book (about the singing lesions [sic], etc.) was written when I was taking codeine all day and all night, and was stimulated by the pain that I kept telling myself I could surely climb up the side of the Flatiron Building.18
For Cather, the Chicago section is the best part of the book and her own experience with feverish pain informs the frenzy with which Thea approaches the city to make her career. Cather throws Thea, the heroine of The Song of the Lark, into the cauldron of social, economic, cultural, and artistic forces bubbling in 1890s Chicago. When Thea needs to recuperate from the exhaustion and illness caused by working in Chicago, she spends time at the Anasazi Indian cliff dwellings in Arizona. Her physical movement from Chicago to the cliff dwellings connects the novel’s Chicago chapters and the Panther Canyon chapters and suggests that the two sections inform each other historically and metaphorically.
Henry Blake Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes.19 The cliff-dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who, like the Anasazi, may become extinct if they continue to participate in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position. Chicago’s ongoing struggle with and self-conscious examination of the “higher life” explains why Chicago patrons, artists, and the art going public embraced The Eight, a group of New York urban realists known derisively in the New York art scene as the Ashcan painters. First shown at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908, their paintings portray immigrant city street life, rendered in broad, spontaneous brushstrokes and vivid colors intended to give a vivacious and celebratory cast to the gritty scene. Patrons of the New York art scene considered the paintings’ subject and presentation too crude and inappropriate, but in Chicago, the Art Institute, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Arts Club of Chicago all held regular exhibits of the group.20 George Bellows, a student of the original Eight, painted the Cliff Dwellers (1913) using bright colors to illuminate immigrant tenements and life on New York’s Lower East Side. The painting succeeds in transforming the cliff dwellers from Fuller’s Europeans perched at the top of Chicago’s downtown buildings into immigrants hanging out of windows in the Bowery. Susan S. Weininger asserts: “After 1910 George Bellows exerted the strongest direct influence of any contemporary American artist on Chicago’s progressive painters.”21 By 1919, he was made a temporary professor at the Art Institute, and in 1922 he was offered a permanent position, which he kept until his death in 1925.22 The Cliff Dwellers, as a statement about immigrants in urban populations, spoke directly to a Chicago, rather than a New York, sensibility, because it employed the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way already legible to Chicagoans.
Cather, too, uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way that would have been legible to turn-of-the-century Chicagoans, as a way of informing Thea’s upward trajectory in The Song of the Lark. Initially, Cather uses the idea of uplift to demonstrate how exposure to art will better Thea and ultimately allow her to escape the provincial world of Moonstone. Before giving a piano lesson, Wunsch “conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler’s sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it, and sat down in a wooden chair beside Thea.”23 He elevates her seat so that she will sit at the proper height during her exposure to European classical music, in turn suggesting the heightening effect of the music on this little girl. His conducting connects him to two other important conductors in her life: Ray Kennedy and Theodore Thomas. Ray’s money allows her to travel to Chicago, and she sees Thomas conduct at a crucial moment in her artistic development in Chicago. Both men will help raise her to greater heights as well by allowing invisible currents to conduct through them. However, Wunsch and Ray do not want anything from Thea in return and do not believe her singing talents will raise the profile of Moonstone, separating Moonstone’s ideas about raising artists from Chicago’s idea about using them to achieve the higher life.
When Thea moves to Chicago, Mr. Harsanyi makes an important discovery: Thea should train to be an opera singer. The discovery changes Thea’s relationship to Chicago’s creation of its higher life and allows the novel’s critique of the Chicago art world to begin. Loretta Wasserman notes: “After finishing The Song of the Lark, Cather had more to say about opera singers. What fascinated her was the difference between performing artists, who must please and charm the public, and artists such as herself—writers or painters—who work in private or even anonymously.”24 Uplift does not apply to solitary pursuits such as writing or painting, but only to those activities that may elevate a considerable portion of the population. Thea thinks her fate is hers alone, but when she becomes a performer, an opera singer, she has the potential to lift up large audiences who hear her, in turn, raising others around her to a higher plane.
The Song of the Lark does not echo the anxiety expressed by Fuller, who is unable to assess whether the immigrants who are lifted up through introduction to European culture are a good thing for Chicago’s art and culture or if their uplift will destroy the very culture that did the heavy lifting. The novel addresses Fuller’s issue with one line: “She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she ‘believed in immigration,’ and so did Thea believe in it.”25 Instead, the novel turns the concern inward onto its artist and asks whether the particularly Chicagoan model of uplift is good for its artists, a question that also troubled Fuller. Cather uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling, in the post-fair Chicagoan’s sense, to examine the ways in which cultural uplift threatened an artist’s spirit and in turn predicted extinction for the artist.
The cliff dwellers make their first appearance in the novel imagistically. Ray, who will be the first to tell Thea about the Anasazi Indian cities, takes her family out to the desert where she sees heifers. The young cows “were magnified to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of that long-vanished sea.”26 Thea sees for the first time how the females of a species can be raised up to heights larger than the role into which they are cast because of their gender. The passage invokes the “prehistoric” Anasazi Indians, who “vanished” because of their upward movement according to Chicago lore. Thea’s observation casts an ominous gloom over the novel’s discussion of her upward trajectory and artistic growth. The passage warns against reaching “preposterous heights” that will result in extinction for those who reach them. Thea later declares she only wants “impossible things,” a signal that the heights to which she will be lifted will guarantee her destruction.27
When Thea moves to Chicago, her metamorphosis into an uplifted Chicago artist begins and the novel continues to employ and expand the metaphor of cliff dwelling to indicate the complexity of her transformation. One night, she leaves the Auditorium Theater and a man accosts her. The Chicago wind racing off of Lake Michigan balloons up her cape and almost lifts her into the sky.28 The strong wind, a uniquely Chicago phenomenon, forces Thea upward violently and against her will, as if she is meant to glide upward onto the tops of the skyscrapers that surround her as she stands on lower Michigan Avenue. If she ascends, she may develop into, in one sense, one of Fuller’s cliff dwellers, the uplifted immigrant who has become a resident of Chicago’s skyscrapers.
At the same time, she wants to hold on to what she has learned and gained from hearing the symphony, and directs her anger at those who want to steal the new knowledge from her. She “glared round her at the crowds” and thinks:
All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. … As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height.29
In her anger, Thea employs the same metaphors used by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company catalog produced for the Columbian Exhibition to describe the Anasazis’ defensive position. She has learned that she must ascend the heights in order to defensively guard against those other, less civilized people who want to destroy what she has now found: the higher culture she obtained at the symphony. Thea seems to embrace the idea of the higher life that Chicago’s art patrons believe will elevate its immigrants.
Thea’s metaphorical uplift transpires because she just heard one of Theodore Thomas’s “heavily symphonic programs.”30 The conductor of the Chicago Symphony believed fervently in the project of uplift and participated by bringing classical European music to Chicago. Donald L. Miller writes: “As Rose Fay wrote of him on the occasion of his death in 1905: ‘He not only disciplined his musicians, but he disciplined the public, educating it sometimes perhaps against its will.’”31 Thea’s uplift also takes place because on the next page, Harsanyi asks Thomas who Thea’s next teacher should be for voice training.32 By juxtaposing Thea’s experience outside the Auditorium Theater with Harsanyi’s request to Thomas inside the same building, the novel skillfully ties together the idea of Thea’s cultural uplift with the Chicago businessmen’s manipulation of the art world through contacts and money.
Thea’s angry reaction to being accosted by the man and the upward thrust of wind can be read as her reaction to being uplifted by Theodore Thomas’s baton against her will. It is at this point that the novel begins to articulate the damage done to an artist when she must defend herself against those who want to use her, including Chicago’s art patrons who will mold her for the purpose of uplifting others. The novel’s paradox emerges here. Thea has benefited from being exposed to Western art and to those engaged in the project of uplifting her, but she suffers from those same contacts that construct her talents as useful and her art as engaging in public service.
When Thea meets Fred Ottenburg, he continues to manipulate the Chicago business scene for her artistic career. Through her involvement with Fred, Thea becomes introduced to the cliff dwellers and their dwellings: the Anasazi Indians and Fuller’s cultural elite of Chicago. While Fred and Thea are “waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake,”33 he tells her that his family owns “a whole canyon of cliff dweller ruins.”34 The conversation draws attention to their perch at the top of the Pullman building, one of the earliest steel-framed skyscrapers in what was called the business canyon of Chicago. Thea and Fred are now Chicago cliff dwellers, in the sense used in Fuller’s novel.
Mark A. Robison observes that from the high altitude, Thea gazes at the Art Institute and at “a lumber boat, with two very tall masts … emerging black and gaunt out of the fog.”35 Her gaze links the Art Institute with a symbol of Chicago commerce, the lumber boat, and Robison declares: “In one perceptive moment, Thea’s urban present and rural past merge with her artistic future.”36 The trajectory promised by her gaze from the heights contains the seed of her own downfall, the merging of art and commerce. The appearance of the boat foreshadows Thea’s dreadful appearance to Dr. Archie at the end of the novel, dressed in black, “deeply lined,” and looking “forty years old.”37
The novel suggests that Thea’s angry, defensive posture against the attacking hordes will crumble as it does for forty-year-old Madame Necker, whom Thea replaces on the stage: “Her voice was failing just when her powers were at their height. Every fresh young voice was an enemy, and this one was accompanied by gifts which she could not fail to recognize.”38 The future threatens extinction for the artists who reach the top, just as it did for the Anasazi cliff dwellers and Fuller’s skyscraper inhabitants who climbed up the high cliffs to ward off their enemies. Ann W. Fisher-Wirth notes: “Cather’s writing has always betrayed a keen sense of loss. At the center of her fiction … is the story of the Garden and the Fall. The lives of most of the major characters enact a recurrent tragic pattern, a sense of dispossession, exile and longing.”39 In The Song of the Lark, the cliff dweller metaphor deepens the sense of loss by showing how the artist gains and loses simultaneously, which causes the tragic pattern Fisher-Wirth identifies playing out in Cather’s later novels.
In The Song of the Lark, Thea will lose because she learns how to be an artist and receives her fundamental training in Chicago. The novel suggests that those who stand at the highest levels in the Chicago art and business scene cannot raise themselves to a higher cultural level because they expect their art to be useful in some way, whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life. The novel draws this ambivalence about Chicago from Fuller’s novel and replicates his doubts about whether Chicagoans can achieve the higher life. The cliff dweller conceit operates as a double-sided metaphor that at once allows the wealthy and cultured citizens of Chicago to stand above the masses, as Thea does at the top of the Pullman building, and simultaneously allows for the wrongheadedness of their ideals to use art to accomplish the business of raising Chicago.
In order to accomplish its critique of the Chicago art scene, The Song of the Lark relies on an intrinsic understanding of the 1890s Chicago club scene and the knowledge that The Cliff Dwellers was also a men’s club, started in 1907 by Hamlin Garland. In 1890s Chicago, two kinds of clubs existed: the men’s clubs, at which businesses were built, bought, and sold, and the women’s clubs, which were interested in the project of social uplift. The contacts and power provided by the men’s clubs allow Thea to continue her work and her ascent. The novel shows her commodification beginning in earnest at the Chicago Club, the most prominent of all the Chicago men’s clubs. Fred reveals that he belongs to the club, as befits his status and wealth, when he takes Bowers there to discuss Thea. She overhears “the young brewer ask Bowers to dine with him at his club that evening, and she saw that he looked forward to the dinner with pleasure.”40 Thea, oblivious to the machinations of the Chicago art scene, wonders: “If he’s such a grand business man, how does he have time to run around listening to singing-lessons?”41 For her, art stands apart from business, so her question highlights her ignorance as to the relationship between art and business in Chicago. Bower’s boasting and excitement over Fred’s invitation makes it evident that the invitation is to the Chicago Club and that Thea is a worthy topic of business. The invitation also underscores that Bowers does not have his own membership to the club, further illustrating his place in Chicago’s business world. Fred’s place is indicated by the fact he does not sit at the millionaire’s table with Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field, but does belong to the same club. It was said that all business done in Chicago happened at this table, and perhaps Fred’s friendship with the extraordinary Nathanmeyers has allowed Thea to be brought to this table.
The millionaire’s table had an established interest in the business of art. The club first housed the Art Institute, before it moved across the street into the building designed after the Columbian Exhibition. They brought Theodore Thomas to Chicago to conduct the music program at the Fair, and then brought him permanently to Chicago with the prospect of his own symphony and the construction of Orchestra Hall. Business discussion at the club traditionally happens in the dining room, over a meal, just as Fred invites Bowers to discuss Thea. When Thea thinks about the men later that night, “She looked up from her grammar to wonder what Bowers and Ottenburg were having to eat. At that moment they were talking of her.”42 Melissa Homestead has demonstrated that “the language of finance and investment permeates the thoughts and speech of both Dr. Archie and Fred Ottenburg,”43 and the passage implies that their topic, Thea, will be consumed right along with their food. The novel condemns the way Chicago’s men’s clubs treat art as business and artists as a commodity to be chewed up and swallowed.
Fuller’s cliff dweller conceit warns that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of the loose group of artists who first met in Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. He designed his club to be like a salon, a place that sheltered artists against the harshness of the Chicago business world. The club formalized around the name “Little Room” and derived their name from a short story by Madeline Wynne that appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1895. Membership included Jane Addams, Lorado Taft, Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, Hamlin Garland, Elia Peattie, and others interested in creating a literary and artistic club in Chicago.
When Thea tells her teacher, Bowers, “I have to hunt a new boarding place,” and Bowers asks, “What’s the matter with the Studio Club? Been fighting with them again?,” she reveals her temporary stay in the Fine Arts Building.44 Even Fuller’s club causes Thea to become angry and demoralized as she fights with the other members of the club, who, it turns out, buy into the Chicago belief that art has a use-value to raise the artistic standards of Chicago. She answers, “The Club’s all right for people who like to live that way. I don’t.” When Bowers asks, “Why so tempery?,”45 her reply provides further evidence that she may be staying with members of this uniquely mixed-gendered club: “I can’t work with a lot of girls around. They’re too familiar.”46
In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. He made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members.47 Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s and Cather’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name The Cliff Dwellers Club two years later.48
Cather, who disliked Garland and was “irritated” by his work, was probably not surprised by his utter disregard for Fuller in taking the name of his novel for his club. In the January 26, 1896, Nebraska State Journal, she wrote a review of James Lane Allen’s “The Butterflies” that turns into one of many attacks she made on Garland: “It is just the sort of thing that poor Hamlin Garland is always trying and failing to do. And the reason thereof is that Mr. Allen has just two things that Mr. Garland has not, imagination and style. … Art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no more temperament than a prairie dog.”49 When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark, Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers Club was well-established, and Chicago readers, hearing that the novel made use of the cliff dweller conceit, would think immediately of Garland’s club. Because Garland was the founder of The Cliff Dwellers Club, he would have represented Chicago’s worst sins regarding art for Cather: social realism, the blending of art and business, the commodification of the artist. Cather seems to be writing specifically against Garland each time the novel suggests that the Chicago cliff dwellers have worn Thea out with their consumption of her art.
The names of the clubs—Little Room, Attic Club, and The Cliff Dwellers —correlate with the significant rooms that Thea moves through in the novel. She “was allowed to use the money—her pupils paid her twenty-five cents a lesson—to fit up a little room for herself upstairs in the half-story.”50 She moves from her little room or attic room through a series of very unsatisfactory rooms, until she has the opportunity to also fit up the Cliff Dwellers room. Sharon O’Brien notes, “In her attic retreat Thea begins to discover the voice or self that is her own,” and she traces the discovery in a line that culminates in Thea’s epiphany in Panther Canyon.51 But Homestead points out: “Even Thea’s nonproductive months alone in Panther Canyon are entangled in Fred’s finances. The canyon is part of a ranch owned by his father, so proceeds from the family beer empire underwrite her artistic awakening.”52 If the rooms Thea moves through as she discovers her own voice are metaphorically Chicago businessmen’s clubrooms, then the novel shows the art and business worlds woven together so tightly that the entire trajectory of her spiritual awakening has also been underwritten by the Chicago business world.
In Chicago, Fred manages to introduce Thea to the one character who wishes Thea to hone her own voice: Mrs. Nathanmeyer. He tells Thea, “You’ll be all right with her so long as you do not try to be anything that you are not.”53 Cather based Mrs. Nathanmeyer on Bertha Palmer, who, with her husband, Potter Palmer, was “so rich and great that even” someone like Thea would have “heard of them.”54 The Palmers built a road to the northern section of Chicago, which would become Lake Shore Drive, and built “The Castle” at its end. The Palmer House, the largest and most modern hotel in Chicago, was her husband’s wedding present to her. She was the only lady manager at the World’s Fair, was known for her Parisian tastes in art and clothing, and with her husband she acquired a magnificent art collection through annual trips abroad. In Paris she met Mary Cassatt, who introduced her to Manet and the other impressionist painters in his group.55
Fred stops Thea to admire the “Rousseaus and Corots” hanging on the Nathanmeyers’ walls, and in the hall he stops her “before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful Manet in the world.”56 Although Polly P. Duryea has identified the painting Fred points out as Manet’s Street Singer (1862),57 which Bertha Palmer never owned,58 Palmer was a friend of Manet’s and was known for her large collection of his work. A reading public that knows 1890s Chicago society would easily recognize Mrs. Nathanmeyer as a version of Mrs. Palmer, the only woman in Chicago who owned Corots, and who could own Manets too, if she chose. Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s “standards … that have nothing to do with Chicago” are also those of Bertha Palmer, whom Fred seems to be describing.59 She “would not confine herself to established standards, but rather visited artists’ studios and current exhibitions, consulted with experts and subscribed to the major magazines in order to explore recent developments.”60 Her standards, as well as her strong feminist ideas, led Palmer to create salons for young artists, particularly female artists who did not fit into the more realistic and gritty Chicago art scene. It is at one of these salons that Thea first meets her, “and this seemed a remarkable opportunity.”61 It certainly is, because Mrs. Nathanmeyer/Palmer has the status and connections to orchestrate Thea’s training and career in New York and abroad, as well as her disgust with the Chicago way of coupling business and art together.
While at the canyon, Fred recalls Mrs. Nathanmeyer, to whom he had introduced Thea in Chicago,62 and on the next page “an eagle, tawny and of great size,” flies directly over the canyon and inspires Thea to rise to her feet with the realization that the Anasazi Indians, though a “vanished race,” have left behind “fragments of their desire”: their art.63 The novel uses eagles as a signal of inspiration in the earlier “Friends of Childhood” section. While on “a great adventure” with her father at a “reunion of old frontiersmen” they went up to the hills where “every little while eagles flew over.”64 For Thea, the trip was significant because “she told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles.”65 She recollects this moment while listening to Dvorak in Chicago, her first symphony: “Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.”66
The eagle’s presence indicates that, symbolically, Mrs. Nathanmeyer watches Thea from behind the scenes and is most likely pulling strings at that moment to allow her to rise to even greater heights in the art world far beyond the limited vision of those businessmen who control the art scene in Chicago. This is the second time Mrs. Nathanmeyer has caused Thea to rise up, inspired, and not angry or feeling used from being raised into Chicago higher life. The first was when she supplied her with a low dress for singing. Thea “laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets, threw her shoulders high and let them drop again.”67 The gift allows Thea to breathe deeply in while singing, providing inspiration, giving life to her spirit, and releasing her from the drudgery of corsets. If the novel ends, as it does in its first version, after Thea’s experience in Panther Canyon, Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s presence as the eagle might be a sign that Thea will escape the clutches of the male, Chicago business art scene.
The fact that it is an eagle that Cather uses to represent inspiration provides additional evidence that Thea may escape. Cather’s audience of Chicago artists and creative supporters would surely see the eagle as a subtle nod to the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony that was founded in 1898 by Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft. The colony, located on the east bank of the Rock River overlooking Oregon, Illinois, provided a respite from the Chicago heat for the Chicago artists and writers. Many of the visitors were also members of the Little Room, including Harriet Monroe, Hamlin Garland, and Henry Fuller. Cather would have certainly known of the colony because her friend Peattie and her husband were founding members.
The name of the camp also comes indirectly from Margaret Fuller’s poem “Ganymede to His Eagle” that she wrote while sitting beneath Eagle’s Nest Tree during her visit to Oregon, Illinois, in the summer of 1843. Eagle’s Nest Camp overlooks Margaret Fuller Island, named in honor of the poet and her poem. Ganymede’s Spring, named by Fuller, provided water to the colony first by horse and wagon and then in 1902 by pump. Lorado Taft’s Blackhawk statue, a 48-foot concrete statue of the Sauk warrior considered to be the second largest monolithic concrete structure in the world, overlooks the river and stands prominently on Eagle’s Nest Bluff. The statue was dedicated in 1911, giving the colony larger name recognition among the reading public who read of the ceremony in the Chicago papers. Cather most likely had the summer retreat in mind, when she sent the eagle over Thea’s head for inspiration during her reclusive summer retreat in Panther Canyon. The layout of Panther Canyon, with an actual eagle’s nest overlooking the river and Thea’s feelings that she is being watched over by the native Americans who formerly inhabited the canyon, resembles the lay of the land around the camp. The club name is a direct reference to the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”68 The eagle, then, is a sign that Thea should be seeking association with like-minded artists, rather than isolation.
Fred’s recollection makes even more explicit the link between the eagle and Mrs. Nathanmeyer, the “heavy, powerful old Jewess, with … an eagle nose, and sharp, glittering eyes.”69 While Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s eagle nose is an anti-Semitic caricature, the image of the eagle soaring far above the canyon replicates her position in relation to the cliff dwellers perched at the top of Chicago’s skyscrapers. She soars far above them with superior standards “that have nothing to do with Chicago.”70 Cather’s representation of this Jewish character is deeply marked by an ambivalence that Susan Meyer has shown as being at work in the representation of Louie in The Professor’s House.
The Palmers were not Jewish, so Cather made a deliberate choice in making Mrs. Nathanmeyer Jewish. Many scholars, most recently Loretta Wasserman, have cited the character as an example of anti-Semitism in Cather’s writing. However, Wasserman claims that the Nathanmeyers “are not significant in Thea’s fate”71 and concludes her longer reading of “The Diamond Mine” by suggesting that the Jewish characters in that narrative are present because Cather “needed an image to convey the dangers of human commodification, and she chose that cartoon figure.”72 The novel frames Mrs. Nathanmeyer in a repulsive stereotype because her power comes from her relationship to her husband’s money and the Chicago businessmen’s dealings in the art world. However, in The Song of the Lark, Fred’s description of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s standards makes them sound like Cather’s own: that art was a “search for something for which there is no market demand … where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”73 Cather constructs the character through her salons, attitudes, connection to Bertha Palmer, and metaphorical appearance in the canyon as a positive force in Thea’s career. The novel’s ambivalence toward the character of Mrs. Nathanmeyer sharpens the critique of the relationship between art and commerce in Chicago by containing the tension in one character.
Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s name may also be a reference to another patron of the arts, the young Mrs. Florence Mayer who was married to one of the owners of the largest department store in Chicago in the decades before the twentieth century, Schlesinger and Mayer. The firm was so profitable that they hired Louis Sullivan to build a new department store building for the firm, at the corner of Madison and State streets in 1902. The building would eventually be leased to Carson, Pirie, Scott, and Company, whose name is still associated with it. Mayer was a student of Sarah Robinson Duff, a well-known voice teacher in Chicago. In a city already known to produce well-trained operatic voices, Duff had a particularly promising student: sixteen-year-old Mary Garden. Garden’s family had financed the move to Chicago for her training, but Duff felt that it was time for her promising pupil to begin training in Paris, something her family could not afford. Duff asked the Mayers to finance Garden’s training abroad. They agreed.74 Cather bases characters on Mary Garden in two stories set in New York that were published in the later collection Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920): “Coming, Aphrodite,” and “Scandal.” Despite Cather’s later references to Garden, her training in Chicago, and the closeness of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s and Mrs. Mayer’s names, only James Woodress has suggested that Mary Garden may be one of the singers whose life Cather drew upon while constructing Thea.75 Most scholarship misses this connection because Thea is more generally read as a version of Olive Fremstad, whom Cather knew and adored as an artist.
This oversight has prevented an understanding of the darker implications of Thea’s Chicago connections and the ways in which she must negotiate the complexities of patronage stemming from these connections. The relationship between Florence Mayer and her protégé was very complicated. Once abroad, Garden flitted between multiple personas: genteel lady whose manners matched those of her sponsor’s class, bohemian who wished only for liberty, and ill-mannered boor whose manners reflected badly on the Mayers. At this point, Garden’s talents clearly surpassed those of Mayer’s and Mayer’s realization that she would be nothing more than an amateur singer whose voice was aging just as Garden’s star was ascending surely produced tension.76 Susan Rutherford suspects that “eventually, the relationship between Garden and the Mayers snapped under the strain of clashing expectations and supposed duties.”77 Someone sent letters anonymously to Florence Mayer that suggested that Garden had a baby out of wedlock. An international scandal developed, where some thought Mayer was trying to destroy Garden’s career and others thought Garden was trying to destroy the Mayer’s reputation. Mayer even spoke to the Tribune to set the record straight that she did not start the rumor, nor did Garden have a baby. Cather drew on this struggle in her later stories about Garden.
The novel draws Thea’s participation in patronage and her use of her Chicago connections and patrons as conflicted and even suggests it is vampiric. Thea lusts after fame and fortune and this causes her to be associated imagistically with the other female gold diggers in the novel. Fred Ottenburg’s mother declares his first wife Edith a “savage” when she does not divorce her son.78 Her word choice echoes an epigraph often connected to Thea in earlier chapters. Thea has “that unfortunate squint; it gives her that vacant Swede look, like an animal,”79 and is repeatedly called that “savage blonde” and “a fine young savage.”80 However, Thea inverts the connotations of the word savage when she smiles “with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.”81 Bram Dijkstra has shown that “by 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership and money.”82 It was the unnatural woman, the barren and childless woman, who lusted after gold and man’s essence and became identified with the vampire.
The vampiric similarities between Thea and the other women foreshadow her own emergence as a metaphorical vampire in the novel’s last chapter. Perhaps, she, too, has been feeding off of Fred and Dr. Archie. Her last name, Kronborg, rings with sounds of money and wealth, as does the name of her future husband Frank. She spends the majority of the novel lambasting cheap things and cheap people, declaring, “To do any of the things one wants to do, one has to have lots and lots of money.”83 Stated to Dr. Archie, this elicits an immediate response from the Doctor who asks if she needs any. Thea may be read here and during other similar conversations as a gold digger, exactly like Edith and perhaps Belle Archie as well. The eruption of the gothic vampire into Cather’s realist novel causes what Judith Halberstam labels, “the disintegration in form and content” and should be seen as, therefore, a very modern device.84 Vampires do not seemingly have a place in a realistic novel and their presence calls every moment that appears realistic into question. In the last part of the novel, we must ask questions about Thea’s growth and artistic designs and whether it had been perverted by her access to Chicago’s club scene and the patrons she met there.
In the last section, the third-person narrator bluntly informs us:
The next time Dr. Archie came to Moonstone, he came to be a pallbearer at Mrs. Kronborg’s funeral. When he last looked at her, she was so serene and queenly that he went back to Denver feeling almost as if he had helped to bury Thea Kronborg herself. The handsome head in the coffin seemed to him much more really Thea than did the radiant young woman in the picture, looking about at the Gothic vaultings and greeting the Hall of Song.85
Here, we are shown the ideal late-Victorian woman: serene, queenly, and dead. But, Dr. Archie’s premonition implies that Thea doesn’t survive the novel either. Her head replaces her mother’s and so the vision of the new woman or new female artist, who is about to appear before us, is cloaked in an image of death. The substitution of the female artist for her dead mother reveals Dr. Archie’s own difficulties with Thea’s revision of a proper woman’s place. She is quite alive and unmarried; but, the familiar Thea has been killed off and replaced by the haughty Diva Kronborg. The last section begins with this paradox because Dr. Archie must wrestle with the uncanny Kronborg for the remainder of the narrative.
In case Dr. Archie’s premonition is overlooked, Cather sprinkles additional references to the new state of things for Kronborg/Thea. Her new name suggests both age and time and identifies her as a witchy Crone. She draws near to Kristeva’s descriptions of the female body as representing disorder and the taboo by being irregular, aged, and most of all grotesque.86 When she finally appears in front of Dr. Archie, it is unsettling: “She was standing in the middle of the room, in a white silk shirtwaist and a short black velvet skirt, which somehow suggested that they had ‘cut off her petticoats all round about.’ She looked distinctly clipped and plucked.”87 Dr. Archie considers, “She seemed to him inappropriately young and inappropriately old, shorn of her long tresses at one end and of her long robes at the other.”88 The doctor uses the metaphor again when he tells Fred Ottenburg her friend and suitor, at the dinner table, “I was thinking how tired she looked, plucked of all her fine feathers.”89 Thea, the songbird and lark of the title, looks distinctly like a bird, plucked and shorn and ready to be cooked for dinner.
The movement of the last section connects these images together rather tightly. Dr. Archie spends his time waiting for and trying to meet the Diva, commenting on her appearance, hearing her sing, and eating a succession of meals with and without her. He has become part of her audience, pushing her to perform and so he has developed an appetite for her. In a frenzy caused by a last-minute bid to fill in for a sick performer, Thea rushes around the room and curses the heavy meal she ate with Dr. Archie and Frank: “If only you hadn’t made me eat—Damn that duck!”90 With the two men, she consumes her own kind, a bird, and drives home the metaphor of vampiric feasting that has been building throughout the last chapters of the novel. Fred consoles her, “You need strength” and seems to insinuate that Thea will gain strength by killing and eating other birds, metaphorically the other singers trying to claw their way to the top of the pecking order.91
However, Thea does give signs that Dr. Archie, Frank, and her audience are metaphorically consuming her. Upon returning to her apartment following a grand performance, her words reveal her thorough consumption. She simply states, “Consider me dead until Saturday, Dr. Archie.”92 On that chosen day, she will rise for her performance, the walking dead who has been clipped and plucked. Then she announces, “Doctor Archie, I invite you both to dine with me on Saturday night, the night after ‘Rheingold.’”93 If she derives strength from eating others like herself, then like a vampire she rises to feast with and on the two men who have financially and emotionally supported her through the long years of training. Yet, performing does make her “dead,” and the two men dine as heavily on birds as she does.
For Freud, doubling initially acts as preservation against extinction. Thea must become Kronborg, similar to her old self and yet entirely different as well, to stave off the dissolution of the self that threatens her as a female artist. On a structural level, the female artist is under threat because of the long tradition of killing or marrying off female protagonists at the end of novels. On a narrative level, she fights against bad patrons and destructive audiences. It seems that wherever Thea turns, she is threatened with sure death. In part, Thea’s backers back her as a kind of insurance for their own immortality. They will ride on her coattails, reaping the immortal success of the truly talented and attempting to prevent their own deaths. However, because they and Thea are able to see themselves replicated in another, they must recognize their own mortality. They become as fleeting and insubstantial as copies. What was once an “assurance of immortality” becomes “the ghostly harbinger of death.”94 The aspect of the double changes and it becomes the opposite of itself. Doubling, for Freud, is what happens in the face of abjection. To see one’s double is to be exposed to one’s own mortality and death. The bird imagery and description of Thea’s dead mother function in just this way. The premonition threatens Dr. Archie and Thea herself is under threat by the mere existence of so many other birds or opera singers. At the same time, the mere existence of the other wives, and opera singers, reminds Thea of her own association with feminine abjection.
Even the eagle in Panther Canyon must struggle against the boys who try to snare it in nets. Thea sees “a watch-tower upon which the young men used to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky; see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the eagle.”95 Because the novel does not end with Thea’s stay in Panther Canyon, her time spent there is not an escape from the Chicago clubs and patrons. Instead, it serves as a reminder of just how fully enmeshed her awakening is with her participation in the business of constructing a higher life for Chicago.
At the novel’s end, Dr. Archie notices that Thea has successfully become a cliff dweller. He gazes at her top-floor apartment in New York: “The fourteen stories of the apartment hotel rose above him like a perpendicular cliff.”96 He also notices in the next paragraph that inside the Metropolitan Opera House “the height of the audience room, the rich color, and the sweep of the balconies were not without their effect upon him.”97 Even though Thea makes her debut in New York and has been trained in Europe, the particularly Chicagoan use of the metaphor of cliff dwelling cloaks her success and indicates that she has succeeded because of the Chicago business world: Theodore Thomas, the Nathanmeyers, the Chicago Club, and Fred, who had the entry into Chicago’s club scene to orchestrate it all. The metaphor also promises that Thea, like Madame Necker and the Anasazi Indians, will eventually disappear.
It is unclear whether Thea recognizes the significance of the Chicago phase of her training and whether she even understands the multiple connotations of the phrase “cliff dweller” in Chicago. But for Cather, the multiple meanings of the phrase allow her to construct a subtle yet biting critique of the Chicago art scene. She pushes back against their belief that art and artists are commodities to be bought, sold, and traded. In doing so, Cather examines the threat of extinction for the artist contained in the notion of cultural uplift.
Fanny Butcher and the crass commercialism of the book market
Cather became friends with Fanny Butcher in the years following the publication of The Song of the Lark. Butcher had been working full time at the Tribune since 1913. She got the job by joining the Illinois Woman’s Press Association. Mary O’Donnell, who was a women’s editor at the Chicago Tribune and also a member, asked her to write a column for women. Butcher branched out into almost every department at the paper, but she wanted to eventually land a book column. Elia Peattie followed by Burton Roscoe were the head literary critics of the Tribune’s Saturday book page and Butcher suggested to the Sunday editor, Mary King, that she could write a tabloid book column. Her column would be quite unlike the cerebral discussions of books in Peattie’s and Roscoe’s Saturday columns and would instead focus on bestsellers and discussions with writers about the publishing world. King agreed and Butcher was now well set up to write about the newest books, become known to the literary world and get her name out to a reading public.98 She would become a good friend to Cather who would draw on her help in navigating the literary world.
In February of 1916, Cather tells Butcher she was so glad to hear she was going into the book business and that “I’d be proud to have my picture in your shop” and “If I can get a few hours in Chicago I will go to your shop.”99 Fanny Butcher’s Chicago Book Shop opened its doors that year and they stayed open until 1927, when the conflict between her position at the Tribune and the bookshop became too apparent. The bookstore became a salon for visiting writers, including Cather, and she would visit Butcher whenever she was in town or had something to promote. She writes on March 9 of that same year that she hopes Butcher will like the book. She hoped: “It will make friends in Chicago and in the West,” and she declares: “The Western audience is the only one I care much about.”100 She handles Butcher as she would a publisher or an editor, enthusiastically promoting her next manuscript or book. In 1922, when Burton Roscoe was fired, Butcher became the Saturday literary critic. She would remain at the Tribune for the rest of her career, spending almost fifty years there.101
The connection between Butcher and Cather was at first professional, following the lines of the other contemporaneous writers, like Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, who wrote her extensive thank you notes for her good reviews.102 Butcher was involved twofold in the project of uplift, constructing alongside the critic H. L. Mencken an American literature rooted in the work of Chicago writers and commercially helping those writers by reviewing their books, opening a bookstore to sell their literature, and giving advice on the book trade to writers who thought of their work as art that existed apart from the crass commercialism of the book business. The modernist writers knew she needed to be courted because her reviews mattered, and produced bestsellers, even if they sometimes disagreed with them vehemently. She was a favorite of the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, and he featured her in advertisements. Whenever she appeared in an advertisement, books sales would skyrocket and Carl Sandburg anointed her “Lady Midwest.”103
Cather often visited with Butcher on her way through Chicago, although she never stayed with her as she did with her old and good friend, Irene Miner Weisz. On March 4, 1920, she wrote a letter to Weisz telling her to “Please go to Fanny Butcher’s shop …. Tell her that Antonia is based on you and Carrie and see how nice she is to you! I want Fanny Butcher to know one of my friends from home.”104 Six years later, on March 18, 1926, Butcher wrote, “Your friend, Mrs Carrie Miner … was in the other day and we proudly looked at the dedication of ‘My Antonia’ together. She said that it always amazed them to find that after all of the ‘wonderful people she must meet and see, she still seems to like her old friends best.’”105 This distinction is an important one because her letters to Weisz during the period after The Song of the Lark are filled with mentions of seeing Butcher and stopping by bookstores at her behest to sell books. On November 14, 1922, Cather writes to Weisz that she will be in Chicago Monday morning, the 27th, because she wants to spend Monday night with Weisz. She said, “I have one or two errands at bookstores, the rest of the time I can be with you.”106 Presumably, one of those bookstore “errands” was at Butcher’s bookstore, which is not the language of great friendship. She writes to Weisz on November 10, 1929, “My two days in Chicago were almost as crowded as those in Omaha. After speaking at the College Club I went to a dinner given for me by several old University classmates whom I was delighted to see again. Next day Fanny Butcher made me go to call upon the heads of all the big book businesses in Chicago—awfully exhausting, but very good policy.”107
Her complaint about how exhausting the rounds are in Chicago recalls Thea’s exhaustion in the same place. Cather never liked the commercial business of art and though she admits to Butcher having good judgment in these matters, she rebels against the Chicago method of mixing art and business. She complains to Butcher from the train on November 5, 1921:
I’m never going to let you shed your life-blood in my charge. Again—damn this trade, I surely won’t kill my friends for it. I had a perfectly delightful stay in Chicago … Are you aware that I got only about thirty minutes of you, alone and undismayed? You must do better than that by me next time please.108
And on February 7, 1924, she begs off her duties in Chicago, suggesting that it is Butcher in Chicago who wears her out tirelessly selling the commercial aspects of her art. She writes to Miner Weisz: “I expect to go West in April—but don’t tell anybody—as I don’t want to make any engagements in Chicago except one to meet you and a few other old friends. I am more determined than ever to shunt the social duties of authorship, even if Mr. Knopf and all the book sellers suffer from my behavior.”109
Butcher clearly pushed Cather to sell her novels and do the rounds in the bookstores that would allow her to sell even more. Cather would come to rely on Butcher for advice about publishers and all things involved in the buying and selling of her art. She writes on December 2 as to whether a certain Mr. Lhona is straight in business affairs.110 And on April 8, 1921, she acknowledges Butcher’s role in her successful publications of The Bright Medusa. She writes to Butcher: “I’m hoping to see you in Chicago when I go there this summer. The Bright Medusa has done very well, hasn’t it? Largely to you and a few more good friends, I suspect.”111 The money that Cather earned from writing allowed her to continue writing and so like Thea, the publicity she had to do was a bitter pill that allowed her to produce more art. Despite Cather’s acknowledgment that Butcher was right in her advice and pushing in the commercial aspects of selling her novels, Cather would still loathe the commercial aspects of art and would find them exhausting. Butcher would be associated with these aspects and the relationship between the two women was complicated at this stage in Cather’s career.
The difficulty in naming Cather’s latest novel in 1921 also demonstrates the complexity of Cather and Butcher’s relationship and how Cather would continue to associate Chicago as a commercial hub that married art and business together in a way that she found distasteful. In August of that year, Cather stopped in Chicago and while there discussed with Butcher the title of her latest book, which she wanted to name Claude. Butcher remembers the meeting in her 1972 memoir and writes that Cather’s novels had titles “that puzzled rather than allured.”112 She recalls,
But Willa was adamant about them, and she always had her way until it came to a novel about a Nebraska boy who went to war. His name was Claude and she called the book Claude. Her publishers and the members of the sales conference all told her it wouldn’t do. She said it was the book’s title and she wouldn’t change it. They argued with her, they pleaded.113
She continues,
The argument over Claude went on for some time between Willa Cather and her publishers, both growing more and more stubborn. Finally, she said she was going to Nebraska; on the way she would see me in Chicago, and let me settle the dispute. I was then a bookseller as well as a reviewer, so I had a double-barreled gun with which to do the settling. I told her without hesitation that Claude wouldn’t do. She had a list of titles she had considered. Not one of them seemed to me to give that little nudge to curiosity which a good selling title does.
She goes on:
Of the many titles she had thought of, I felt the best was One of Ours, for the book was about a young Midwesterner who became one of our fighting men. I persuaded her to relinquish Claude, which she did reluctantly, and happily One of Ours received that year’s Pulitzer award.114
Cather writes of the meeting differently and relates her version to her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, on September 1, 1921:
O.K. to every thing in your letter. I had a long talk with Fanny Butcher about the title, and am again shaken—not as to the rightness of Claude, but as to the wisdom of using it. She begs and implores me not to! Now, I will be quite satisfied with “One of Ours” [then printed out] “One of Ours,” if you like it. It has merits; it has plenty of “O”s, is euphonious and mystifying—and it is “easy to say.” Please let me hear from you.115
Changing the name leaves her “shaken” and not happy about the change brought about from her conversation in Chicago with Butcher as is demonstrated by the fact she continues to call the book Claude ignoring its commercial title. She writes to Elsie Cather around September 16, 1922, “Poor Claude seems to have kicked up the devil of a row.”116 The next month, on October 26, she writes to Irene Miner Weisz, “Claude is having such a splendid success that the temptations of the world glitter more than usual,– though I haven’t really been well enough to be really gay.”117 On January 24, 1923, she writes again to Miner Weisz, “‘Claude’ goes on selling merrily, and letters keep coming in about him, lovely enough to break your heart.”118 She did not want to relinquish the title.
Despite the conversation and Butcher’s relating of her part in Cather’s success with the novel in 1972, she had no problems at the time giving it a terrible review, lamenting its distance from the heartfelt promises she believed were made by O Pioneers and My Antonia. Cather writes to Elsie Cather about the reviews of her Claude, most likely on September 16, 1922:
He is not regarded as a story at all, but as an argument, as everything he is not. Lots of my old best-friends don’t like it; Mencken thinks it a failure, Fanny Butcher wails forth her disappointment. They all expected it “would be just like Antonia” they say! It’s hard to part with old friends, but one can’t be a trick-dog and go on repeating even to please one’s friends. It’s a parting of the ways, I’m afraid, and here I lose friends I’m sick to lose. They insist that I could not resist the temptation to be a big bow-bow about the War. “The other books were personal, this is external” they say!! Of course the people who are for it are just as hot, but they are rather a new crowd, not the old friends I liked to please. I always hate to lose old friends. Well, we never get anything for nothing, in life or in art. I gained a great deal in mere technique in that book—and I lose my friends. Please take the enclosed.119
Cather fully expected her relationships with Butcher and Mencken to change as a result of their resistance to the novel and this fact indicates the purely commercial reasons, in Cather’s mind, for their friendships at the time. Her relationship with Butcher didn’t end, despite Cather’s prediction, most likely because One of Ours won a Pulitzer, in spite of Butcher’s review. Cather didn’t need to rely on Butcher anymore for commercial success and so over the next several decades, their letters record a friendship blooming with their letters containing many more personal inquiries, concern, and heartfelt signatures. Cather inquires after Butcher on December 18, 1936, “I am very upset and concerned, my dear Fanny, to hear that you have been ill. What in the world knocked you out? Have you been working too hard, or seeing too many people? When I get knocked out I can always trace it back to ‘social excesses’—to seeing and being interested in too many people.”120 Her earlier letters, from fifteen years before, complained of her own health and exhaustion as a result of Butcher’s urging of her to do professional socializing in Chicago. Now she expresses concern about Butcher for the same reasons.
But even as the relationship changed, Cather still tried to keep a clear line between the friendship and the professional relationship, writing in the same December 18, 1936, letter: “I asked you not to use a quotation from my letter simply because I do not like to seem to be ‘selling’ an article by means of private correspondence: ‘bragging it up’ to the reviewer, as the little boys would say.”121 Perhaps this is why, after Cather’s death, Butcher was so upset with the publication of Willa Cather: On Writing. She felt that it was a posthumous work that clearly violated Cather’s wishes to not have any unfinished or posthumous work published after her death. Edith Lewis, Cather’s partner, editor, and executor, wrote back to her on October 8, 1949, to try to assuage her concerns and show that the work was mostly reprinted work that couldn’t be rightly considered posthumous. Butcher was not convinced and her action should be read as the overzealous protection for her good friend, Willa Cather.