No Stage Catholics

The embrace between Catholics and Willa Cather is easy to explain, at least from the Catholic side. A Pulitzer-winning novelist set out to write “something in the style of legend” about French missionaries who established the Diocese of New Mexico. Enthusiastic reviews for Death Comes for the Archbishop quickly appeared in The Commonweal, America, and the Catholic World in the autumn of 1927. Cather granted the Catholic Church a central place in a more inclusive legendarium about the origins of America. In some of her surviving letters, Cather describes Catholics as “broad-minded,” “handsome,” and “lovely” in their reception of her novel. But she did not want to be pulled too close at that time. “I feared nothing so much as seeming a sort of stage Catholic,” Cather confides in a friend. When we pretended to read Death Comes for the Archbishop in high school, I was less broad-minded. I found it boring.

What drew Cather towards Catholicism is more of a puzzle. She never entered the Church. Many readers thought she must have. In his survey of twentieth-century American literature, published in 1937, Vernon Loggins mistakenly asserts that Cather converted to Catholicism. A student at Mount Saint Mary’s named John Walsh, inspired to write his undergraduate thesis for this reason, found it “incredible” that one should revere Rome as a “great organization” and “spiritual power” and not enter into communion with Catholics. His letters further annoyed Cather. She wrote the head of his English department in a fit of pique. “I am an Episcopalian because my mother and father were,” she insists perfunctorily, “and that Church is home to me.” Déjà entendu—my father has said almost the same to me.

Cather perhaps admired Catholics more than Catholicism. I think she would have admired my mother’s late mother, Sally O’Grady Smith, my only Catholic grandparent. Gram was the daughter of Irish immigrants and a widow who raised six children working as a night nurse. Later in life, she worked as a hospice nurse and came by a disdain for literary social critic types. Gram would ask incredulously how Lewis H. Lapham (R.I.P.), the son of her charge and then the editor of Harper’s Magazine, could be “so liberal.” This was a loud part of my grandmother’s story. A few family members share something of Marilynne Robinson’s grudge against the “weird intrusion” of Fox News for this reason. But as Cather knew well, often working-class people want nothing less than the well-meaning charity of a benevolent elite, and nothing more than to make it through life by hard work and their own lights. Right-wing cable news was not such a “weird intrusion,” then, in the case of my grandmother’s conservative politics. But I want to focus on Gram’s spiritual lights rather than her political ones, because I am less interested in Cather’s disdain for communists and enthusiastic New Dealers. Plus, Gram’s frequent mantra, “Keep the faith,” is the reason I am a cradle Catholic.

Long before Death Comes to the Archbishop threatened to make her a “Catholic writer,” and even before her trips to the vanishing world of the Old Southwest in 1912 and 1915, Cather was telling the overlooked stories of hard-working Catholic immigrants. Cather’s first published story, “Peter,” which appeared in the Boston literary magazine the Mahogany Tree in 1892, introduces a Bohemian immigrant who plays “Ave Maria” on the violin he refuses to sell, prays the Lord’s Prayer in the only Latin he knows, and fears the devil and his Sabbath-breaking son. Peter Sadelack is a first sketch of Ántonia Shimerda’s father, the devout Bohemian violinist who is tragically unsuited to the pioneer lifestyle. From the very first, Cather wishes to show us the world of the Nebraska frontier through the Catholic eyes of her Czech neighbors, like her childhood friend Annie Sadilek, the model for her humble heroine Ántonia. Ralph McInerny reminds us that O Pioneers! and My Ántonia already establish Cather as the writer who tells the overlooked stories of especially rural Catholic immigrants. She admired tough Catholic women in the first place.

Me too. I am grateful for my Catholic roots, and so to Gram, for making the Church a home to me from childhood. These allowed me to deepen my faith privately, that is, as a child can, gradually and alongside stupid youthful enthusiasms—libertarianism, Tolstoyism, process theology—for which only old friends can embarrass me still. One does not have to be a famous writer like Cather to seem like a stage Catholic nowadays. There are Catholic lifestyle influencers on social media. The conversions of actors, athletes, journalists, students, and whatever Russell Brand is are very public affairs now. Many zealous converts feel the burden of making a strong and respectable performance for the world—they know it will not be a popular one. They are paraded around with all the answers. Alas, they do not have all the answers. Social media gives many converts a hard yoke and a heavy burden. Gram could not give me the faith in any direct sense, obviously, but she and my mother led me as a child to where the easy yoke is found.

Cather’s noblest human types—the pioneer and the artist—endure great suffering to create new things. The virtuoso heroine of The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg, leaves a Colorado railroad town for Chicago, Dresden, and New York, but she remains “still Methodist enough” to believe that everything hard and irksome is good for her. Conversely, O Pioneers! intones, “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Alexandra’s far-sighted love for the land becomes her success. Yet early on Nebraska is the formless sea of pre-created nothingness described at the beginning of My Ántonia as “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” Cather’s observation is the hard-boiled realism of an appreciative second-generation Nebraskan. The pioneer must be like an artist, because only dreamers, idealists, and optimists could survive on the frontier at first—if they had the grit. Cather’s dreamers are not the fragile sort. In an interview with the Lincoln Sunday Star, Cather praises Annie Sadilek’s ability to bear hardships, and calls the farmwife and mother of twelve “one of the truest artists I ever knew.” Thea and Alexandra, the artist and the entrepreneurial pioneer, are a pair—but the long-suffering Ántonia, persevering to raise a large and poor family with good cheer, crowns the trio.

Cather fought for years to write stories about the plain people she admired. (In a letter praising Winston Churchill in 1942, Cather confesses that her nature is “given to hero-worship.”) She came to New York to work for McClure’s Magazine, the famous muckraker outfit that pioneered investigative journalism. Hermione Lee makes an apt comparison between Cather and George Eliot, because both women had long careers as writers before they wrote their first novels around the age of forty. Yet Cather was determined not to follow in the footsteps of Ida Tarbell or Upton Sinclair. She besmirches the fashion for “belittling biography” that subordinates the character to some grand social theme. She was disillusioned by reformers who wrote exposés of villains and their victims. Instead, Cather defended the escapist quality of literature. Literature is a retreat into those rare and most meaningful moments that define our lives. In another open letter published by Commonweal in 1936, she writes that all art is an effort to preserve “for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.” She approaches her subjects with admiration, teaching us to admire our American forebears. She warns that we have inherited all of their idealism but none of their grit.

Catholicism’s emphasis on suffering drew Cather in. In a letter written in 1934 during a spell of hundred-degree days in New York City, Cather writes to her sister, “If I were Catholic I’d be sure this world is being punished for its new ways of thinking and behaving.” Catholics find meaning in suffering, of course, but we also find refuge in the Church. In Death Comes to the Archbishop, after a harrowing experience on a Pueblo ceremonial mesa, where Bishop Latour hears the cries of ancient human sacrifice reverberating from a chasm in the stone, he reflects how the Church is a rock of safety that is the hope of all “tormented creatures.” Cather found this solace, too, at least once. When her brother, Douglass Cather, died an untimely death in California in 1938, she went to the Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer so that she could pray while his funeral took place. The Episcopal churches, she writes to her sister, “close at six. . . . The Catholics seem to be the only people who realize that in this world grief goes on all night, as well as the day, and they have a place for it to hide away and be quiet.” Cather’s is a tough-minded and matter-of-fact appreciation of the Church as a place of condolence. Unfortunately now most churches are locked after hours.

Long after her beautiful tribute to Ántonia, or her Annie Sadilek, Cather remained drawn to strong, suffering Catholic women. She met Sigrid Undset months after the Norwegian novelist’s son was killed in action in 1940. Cather describes Undset’s “heroic calm” and calls her the greatest and most truthful woman she has ever known. Cather particularly admired the self-discipline of the religious life. She praises the cleverness of the Church’s orders that develop the gifts of “the most human women in the world.” In an interview with Conor Dugan for Catholic World Report, Stephen Schmalhofer discusses how Cather writes admiringly about missionaries like Bishop Latour and Fr. Vaillant to hold readers up to their “heroic standard.”

We who suffer less should be skeptical of our spiritual toughness. By this I mean we who are inheritors of civilization rather than pioneers, critics rather than artists, and celebrity-obsessed rather than attentive to plain people. Bradley Birzer and John Paul Old emphasize how Cather writes an ampler story of America that includes the missionaries of the Old Southwest and rural Catholic immigrants of the Great Plains. The people who built and defended this country were physically and spiritually tough, especially when we use contemporary standards for the traumatic as a baseline. Cather would have despised the twenty-first century for its belittling biographers, stage Catholics, and fragile people. But she goes too far.

Dreading the appearance of being a stage Catholic is, of course, a vain reason for not entering the Church. In her moments of spiritual dryness, Cather remains true to her Virginia roots, resembling Walker Percy’s Southern Stoic gentleman who stands grumbling on the porch—the stoa—of the grand edifice of Christian hope. Her youthful shahada (“There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer”), the strange frequency of tree worship in her novels, and her fascination with the steady-state cosmological theory of Sir James Jeans are hints of a resigned pantheism in Cather. The Catholic Church may be the finest spiritual gym—at least so it seemed during her times—but isn’t God everywhere? We face trials in life that demand the spiritual muscles (even thick-headedness!) that Gram possessed. But we need such strength precisely in order to hold fast to a particular Divine Person Who commands all people to come to Him in a particular way. On all sides is the territory of different middle-witted too-tough-for-Jesus types, from those whom Sohrab Ahmari calls our dime-store Nietzscheans to the democratic pantheism with which Cather sometimes flirts. All of these are too tough-minded to love the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After demanding a kiss, Gram would unfailingly ask: “Isn’t it nice to be loved?” Ordinary Christians are tough because they keep the faith, because they dare to hope, and above all because they enjoy being loved. It is nice to be loved.

Yet Cather must have understood it is not enough to admire the spiritual toughness of Catholics from Undset to her literary creations. In The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter takes an appreciative external view of medieval Christianity, before the Scientific Revolution, in his lectures. This art-or-religion that allowed men to believe in “the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives” is the only period of human happiness. His only salvation in the novel is the family seamstress, Augusta, a devout German Catholic who speaks bluntly, but never morosely, about death and hardship. The spiritual toughness of Catholics, in Cather’s mind, is linked especially to the disciplines and practices by which we encounter death. Christ, in His mercy, founded a Church that gives doubtful, listless, and even shattered people things to do.

In a letter from 1932, Cather credits the Church for the “wisdom” and “kindness” to recognize the “instability” of our spiritual lives, where there are both flashes of inspiration and periods of dryness. The notion that people collectively experience spiritual growth over time, progressively—an assumption of my aforementioned youthful enthusiasms—seems foolish and even cruel to Cather. Significantly, in this letter, Cather is correcting a Catholic historian who would go on to a long career teaching the seminarians of the Diocese of Rochester. (Readers interested in whether this is fair to Fr. Robert Francis McNamara should consult the biography A Priest Forever.) Many Catholics today seem to believe that our times are morally and spiritually more mature in comparison to ages past, especially because we are in a better position to appreciate human dignity by dint of some legal reforms and public norms. Cather would probably admonish us on this score—do contemporary people really respect the dignity of human persons more than plain people of the past did? On the other hand, Catholics seem to have lost the spiritual toughness of Cather’s heroines or of my grandmother, for that matter.

I was drawn to Cather last summer, as we mourned the death of Gram and I moved my parents from their hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, to my children’s hometown of Ashland, Ohio. I listened to O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark on audiobook on the long stretches of I-80 in a U-Haul truck. I packed up my great-grandfather’s scrimshaw and chart chests, uprooting my family from New England—for they were still in New England, barely—after so many generations. From the O’Gradys, the latecomers of my family tree, I have only a knickknack, a leprechaun figurine leaning on an illegible sign. A little nostalgia is prerequisite for loving Cather; indeed, there is nothing wrong with loving vanished places and admiring the people who eventually vanished with them. We can admire the sufferings and hold true to the aspirations of our forebears—immigrants, pilgrims, and pioneers—and those who risked death and hardship to pass down some ways to us towards God and country.

Since I only took to Cather the umpteenthtime or so I encountered her, I am vindicated by the fact that Cather did not want her books taught in schools. I learned this fact from a conversation between Schmalhofer and the late Gerald Russello a few years ago which is floating around on the Internet. I assume Gerry first encountered Death Comes for the Archbishop some eighteen years before I did in John Tricamo’s American Literature class for juniors at Regis High School. In college I finally read the book with keen interest for the simple reason that I was falling in love with a young woman who loved Cather very much. (My wife’s favorite is Shadows on the Rock.) But that was it. More recently still I read Delightful People, Schmalhofer’s book of essays about Cather’s milieu. But then I was only interested in the Catholic and literary history of southwestern Connecticut. Somehow only after Gram died did the mood strike me to read everything of Cather’s.

Gram could remember when the large inn across the street from her house on Shippan Point was frequented by artists and writers coming up from New York. That world has vanished to make room for people who work in finance. Among this tribe of commuters, at least Schmalhofer is still interested in the world since displaced by the New Haven Line. Schmalhofer explores the bohemian days of Cos Cob, Connecticut—shabby artsy people now, not Czechs—that Cather sometimes wrote in but never about. These eccentric artists and glittering conversationalists certainly absorb Schmalhofer more than they did Cather. Soon after she moved to Pittsburgh to take up the exhausting life of a young and dedicated schoolteacher, Cather describes to a friend how she is abandoning her tomboyish affectations in order to “do the society act.” Her literary imagination was never captured by the smart set in the East, but then again in her day it was not an all-but-vanished world.

Delightful People transports us to a time when a literary avant garde in America was fascinated by Catholicism—Henry Adams, Henry James, of course Cather herself. How strange this seems today. Catholicism fails to excite the American literary imagination in the same way anymore. No doubt some of this is the fault of our writers. The cramped, critical perspective that Cather associated with the muckrakers has become an imperative one for so many novelists that a modern-day Willa Cather seems unimaginable. (Camille Paglia’s warm recollections of her Catholic upbringing are as close an approximation as I can think of.) She lived with a woman as her lifelong partner, and yet remained distinctly conservative in her moral and religious attitudes. Contemporary biographers, of course, fixate on her sexuality, even belittling her as a victim of an oppressive society. (Benjamin Taylor’s recent biography Chasing Bright Medusas is better in this respect.) Still, “attitude” and critical posturing has triumphed over Cather’s preference for propriety and self-discipline. M.F.A. programs lure novelists to start much younger. Probably this is why it is so rare to find a Cather or an Eliot affirming the hard lessons of adulthood that have shaped their characters and, more importantly, the characters of their adult friends. Rarer still, of course, is earnest hagiography. Simone Weil complains that it is easier to make evil compelling in fiction, when good is so much more compelling in life.

Of course, the failure may be the Church’s—that is, ours. If we are eager to meet modern people where they are, the Church will no longer appear old, strange, and otherworldly to artists. More to the point for a potential new Cather, we have discarded so many disciplines that made old-school Catholics spiritually tough. These days, we are exhorted, in the words of the inaugural homily of Pope Saint John Paul II to keep our church doors open. Expectations for solemnity could be higher. Gram never did like the chummy intermission of “shaking hands” at Mass, the chief affront of the Vatican II-era changes in her mind. She was not a traditionalist, but then my grandfather died just a couple of days before the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium. I think she despised the casual exuberance that interrupts those suffering people who are preparing to take their petitions to the altar in the silence of their hearts. Ralph McInerny suspected that Cather would have also hated the more “egregious dismantling” of so many parishes that took place during the 1970s, since she loved the old-timey religious art of the adobe churches of the Old Southwest. Perhaps, had she lived as late as Agatha Christie, there would have been a Willa Cather indult for the Tridentine Mass in the United States, so great was the sway of the women writers of the Anglican Communion with Pope Paul VI. Or perhaps not. The extent to which the liturgical reforms have contributed to the spiritual fragility of our times is a profound question. So much has changed.

Cather is a great witness of American Catholics’ forbearance in a world of suffering, even if she did not completely understand it. Doubtless we Catholics do not understand grace and suffering completely, either. “That’s life,” Gram would often say matter-of-factly. “That’s why you have to keep the faith.”