Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

Professor's House and My Antonia would be my recs. She was an odious person and an incredible writer.

also i feel like she's foundational to the school of Midwestern realism that produced writers like William Maxwell

^^ this

She was an odious person

Curious about this. I know next to nothing about her as a person, beyond the fact that she grew up in Nebraska and lived with a woman for a good part of her adult life.

Here's a good read: https://newrepublic.com/article/114897/willa-cathers-correspondence-reveals-something-new

This is fun too https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/terry-castle/pipe-down-back-there

Odious seems likes it's putting it mildly. Really didn't detect anything approaching an incredible writer in Pioneers - which I found hackneyed, cliched, stagey, misogynist - but like I say, maybe she suddenly miraculously got good?

It's an early novel.

can someone give me a cliff's notes - was she horribly classist, racist, patriarchal or more just a run of the mill egotistical asshole?

A wishy-washy lesbian and a less wishy-washy anti-Semite.

Here's a typical quote from the Terry Castle LRB I linked above:

"There was only one problem, as Acocella, now gimlet-eyed, points out. Cather herself was a full-bore raving misogynist, at least on the subject of female authorship:

‘Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts literary talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it,’ she wrote in 1895. ‘I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.’ Female poets were so gushy – ‘emotional in the extreme, self-centered, self-absorbed’. As for female novelists, all they could write about was love: ‘They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable ... If I see the announcement of a new book by a woman, I – well, I take one by a man instead ... I prefer to take no chances when I read.’

Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Kael made similar noises. They internalized misogyny like most people did and do.

Her novels Song of the Lark and Saphira and the Slave Girl give a fair number of clues to where she sits within the spectrum of racism, classicism and patriarchy. Within the context of her life and times, she places more toward the liberal end. Within the context of our times, there's plenty of racism, classism and patriarchy to criticize or scorn.

If you're looking for a full-throated critique of USA racism, classism and patriarchy during Cather's period, you may as well go straight to Emma Goldman, because there's not a whole lot of well-known women writers to keep her company. Almost everyone else was a voice shouting into the storm and immediately lost.

never mind her bollocks, check xpost The Professor's House. Hemingway's Collected Stories, starting with some recent peaks and then starting over from the beginning, is also worth staying with. I still haven't read his novels, but have heard he's better w stories. A Movable Feast is a graceful stroll through zee Paree of his youth, with shitty little claims about Fitzgerald and Stein, a colorful anecdote in which Ezra Pound saves the day, also a good zing of Wyndham Lewis:"He had the eyes of a disappointed rapist."
Totally agree about Lenny Kaye's xpost acapella essay.

o pioneers is doper than dope

cather prob not for u

i mean i also find the control exercised and the painterly precision of the desert landscape evoked in death comes for the archbishop magical and worlds away from the melodrama of o pioneers, but i love a melodrama that's all unresolved inner tension :)

anyway, i rate her higher than fitzgerald barring tender is the night, hi alfred

Bracing tho the Cather chat is, actually more interested in Shirley Jackson recs, tho it's admittedly not a vast oeuvre.

The last Shirley Jackson thing that I read and really enjoyed was a short and mysteriously nasty story called 'The Summer People'. I see it's included in a Penguin anthology of Jackson's 'Dark Tales', which looks tremendous:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30303793-dark-tales

I may have praised Thte PRofessor's House in another thread: structurally odd, most homoerotic of her fiction.

I was glib about Hemingway, my first adolescent crush on a writer; all I need are the first 15 stories and TSAR. Creative writing majors can learn about concision and understatement from Cather without the bullshit, though.

Cather herself was a full-bore raving misogynist, at least on the subject of female authorship:

‘Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts literary talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it,’ she wrote in 1895.

Piedie, you should try reading the work of the average female poets and novelists of her era, the sort who were widely read because they were published in mass circulation magazines. She wasn't raving in that quotation, she was raging.

She's one of those white writers from the Gilded Age, the Progressive pusbback "yellow journalism," all that and more---incl. awareness of European and Russian advances in modernism---struggling with conditioning and other pressures, not to give her a pass, or other Western writers you also have to scavenge from, like Frank Norris and Jack London (or Michigan's own crazy Hemingway, Minnesota's more likable and rewarding art-pop Fitgerald, Ohio's genius-to-perverse-fuckoff

I may have praised The PRofessor's House in another thread: structurally odd, most homoerotic of her fiction.

Ohio's genius-to-perverse-fuckoff*SHERWOOD ANDERSON**, Ah meant to say---sorry, Sher!

Are Anderson's novels worth reading? Poor White's supposed to be the one. My uni library copy was last checked out in 1986.

oh i like cather. thanks for the cliff's notes, not really enough to tarnish the magic for me given the time and place. that being said i'd rather find some of the 'lost' ones than go back to cather but there's only so much time in a day.

Do people not rate Faulkner here? Fitzgerald and Hemingway keep getting mentioned from this era.

Yeah, I think a fair number of us do rate him; I was just responding about Western incl. Midwestern heads. The Hamlet was my gateway, but The Portable Faulkner (orig. 1954, but I think the '77 edition I read might have been expanded or corrected a little?) is also an early fave, with stories and excerpts from novels in chronological order of their setting, clarifying unity without trying to give us everything Essential in one volume (and at least one excerpt might be spoilery), but, while not ideal it's an awesome portable doorstop. Also of course As I Lay Dying seems exemplary. Pylon is purple prolix Midwest-to-New Orleans Depression de facto proto Beat barnstorming, letting off steam while writing something else, he said: crazy and good. Still need to read a lot more of his.

Some perceptive, reasonably qualified praise for TPF here:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-portable-faulkner_william-faulkner_malcolm-cowley/377833/#edition=4482139&idiq=35495202

Faulkner rules.

xxxpost haven't read Sherwood Anderson's novels, but yeah publisher's hype for Poor White looks promising, from his peak years too:

Completed one year after his classic Winesburg, Ohio and long regarded as his finest novel, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White captures the spirit of small-town America during the Machine Age. Hugh McVey is a protagonist Robert Lovett once called "a symbol of the country itself in its industrial progress and spiritual impotence." A lonely and passionate inventor of farm machinery, he struggles to gain love and intimacy in a community where "life had surrendered to the machine." Through his story Anderson aims his criticism at the rise of technology and industry at the turn of the century. Simultaneously, he renders a tale of eloquent naturalism and disturbing beauty. Poor White was praised by such writers as H. L. Mencken and Hart Crane when it was first published. It remains a curiously contemporary novel, and a marvelous testament to Sherwood Anderson's "sombre metaphysical preoccupation and his smouldering sensuousness" (The New Republic).

Alfred it OTM in this thread. I rank Cather top 5 among American novelists, for form & structure she has few peers, and the clarity of her writing makes Hemingway read purple

Pylon is purple prolix Midwest-to-New Orleans Depression de facto proto Beat barnstorming, letting off steam while writing something else, he said: crazy and good

I’ve read all the Faulkner biggies from 1929-36, plus Go Down Moses, but not Pylon. Your description sounds awesome.

Yeah, if you want thee purple, here tis. I like Hemingway's more furtive,leaky-head purple in some of his stories.
xxp poblisher's hype:Although descriptions like that are reductive: Anderson was from the sticks, but also a successful copywriter, newspaper editor-publisher, travelling media (incl. arts) pro, not some Luddite preacher, although he had his obsessive-impulsive concerns.

(But already started fucking around with them too much in lesser stories of otherwise crazy-good Triumph of the Egg, his second collection)

reductive but you know, that was one of the conflicted results of The Age of The Machine: overly determined takes on the fate of characters---seems like Cather's "Paul's Case" had a close call, but I remember it as being satisfying enough, ultimately (might be wrong).
Jeez and all the bad dystopian science fiction of the 50s and much later---

I may have mentioned in these threads two summers ago that i read the post-Winnesburg short fiction in the LOA edition and was impressed.

I used to teach "Paul's Case" in my early years; it took a student in class to wonder if she was gay, based on the treatment of the protagonist.

post yeah I read the post-Winesburground-upTriumph of the Egg in the LoA Collected Stories, and was favorably impressed by *most( of it, although some crits say he went downhill after those, but I'll continue later.

Oh yeah, Jill LePore's freewheeling New Yorker my-life-as-a-bicyclist-from-the-age-of-two memoir (which I'm tempted to retitle "Always Crashing On The Same Bike," but techically there have been different bikes), spins around some references to xpost ilx grad Jody Rosen's Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of The Bicycle, which she tags as "quirky, kaleidoscopic stories"( we should prob give that first adjective a vacation; I'd miss the second one too much)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/bicycles-have-evolved-have-we-jody-rosen-two-wheels-good

I despise Sherwood Anderson, adore the lushness of Fitzgerald and Faulkner (in their different ways), and believe that Hemingway wrote two good books and the rest is utter dreck.

Cather is miles above them, even just "Paul's Case" is better than anything Fitzgerald ever set to paper afaic.

Yay! We love Cather!

I didn't know Anderson had enough of a profile in this century to be despised, which I write without snark.

well yknow the table is the table (high, tables!) Speaking of western US lit, an ilx search on Wallace Stegner mainly turned up a couple of favorable passing mentions by James Morrison---anybody else got an opinion---?

The couple of Wallace Stegner novels I've read were OKish, but nothing from them has stuck with me. I enjoyed his non-fic book on the Powell expeditions, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian more than the two novels.

I loved Angle of Repose. As a child of the West, I found him to be one of the writers who understand it best.

went through a phase a while back during which i was never certain if it was 'angle of repose' or 'angel of repose'

That's the one I keep hearing about.

I love Big Rock Candy Mountain— it’s a real epic family tragedy of the West, in both Canada and the US. Great book.

i also read a long story, more like a novella, of his when I was 16, and it had some effect on me at the time, but i cannot for the life of me remember what it was. I keep thinking about Faulkner’s “The Bear” instead, which I also read around the same time.

remember really liking Stegner's Angle of Repose, and also Cather's My Antonia, but those reads were decades ago