Source of book: I own this.
Last year, I decided that I would intentionally read a book by an LGBTQ+ author for Pride Month. In that case, I started with Q. E. D. by Gertrude Stein. This is not to say that I haven’t read books by queer authors before - I have a list here (although I suspect I have missed a few) - but I wanted to make a concerted effort to feature one during Pride Month.
I decided to read The Song of the Lark for a few reasons. First of all, I love Willa Cather. The triggering event, however, was the chapter that Alex Ross devotes to Cather and her relationship to Wagner’s music in his epic synthesis of culture, politics, and music, Wagnerism. Ross ties together Cather’s personal life (she was a lesbian, but much of her personal life was private until after her death) with her art - and with her particular resonance with Wagner’s music. (Which pervades this book, by the way.)
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect with this book, since Cather’s books tend to be conventional on the surface. This is the case with this one as well. There are no overtly lesbian themes, for example, and to the extent there is a romance, it is heterosexual. In this case, it is all in the context.
The Song of the Lark is fiction that draws from two real-life characters. The first is Cather herself - her own upbringing in a small prairie town, her feeling of not fitting in, her move to the big city to become an artist, and so on. The other is the famous mezzo-soprano, Olive Fremstad. Essentially, Cather’s early life is used for the first part of the book, and Fremstad’s career is the basis for the second.
[Fun rabbit trail: Fremstad was singing with Caruso in San Francisco the night before the big earthquake. Both survived, but got the hell out of Dodge as soon as they could. Also, one of my wife’s relatives (another opera singer) allegedly hit Caruso over the head with either an umbrella or a wine bottle, after he tried to pinch her butt.]
So how does this tie in with queer history? Well, Cather herself was lesbian, and had a history of gender bending, particularly as a college student when she dressed in mens’ clothing and went by “Will” or “William.” She had two long-term relationships with women. And she also crushed really hard on Fremstad, one of the premier Wagnerian singers of the era.
Oh, and Fremstad was likely not straight either. She claimed (like Thea Kronborg in the book) to be mostly uninterested in romance. She had two brief marriages, both of which ended in divorce, and had a long term relationship with her secretary, Mary Cushing. (Marcia Davenport wrote a novel that is believed to be based on this relationship.)
So, in the context of the author and inspiration, one can kind of read between the lines. That said, I think that My Antonia is probably the book that is most obviously lesbian. Once you realize that Jim is the stand-in for Cather, it makes sense.
So, about the book itself. It follows the protagonist, Thea Kronborg, from childhood to the flowering of her career on the stage, with most of the book spent on her formative years. It is a loving portrait of an exceptional girl, rather precocious, but very human and full of the usual doubts and fears. She seems doomed to life in a small town, playing piano and organ, teaching a few hopeless students, marrying some stolid guy, having a dozen babies like her mother, and finding herself doomed to domestic drudgery.
What happens, however, is that her friend Ray, a railroad worker with aspirations to marry Thea when she is old enough, is killed in an accident, and his life insurance is left to Thea, with the instruction that she is to use it to get some professional lessons in Chicago. She does, discovers that her true talent and passion is singing, not piano, and decides to make a go of it as a career. Along the way, she is also aided by another friend from her hometown, Dr. Archie, who lends her the money to study in Germany, and young beer magnate Fred Ottenberg, who recognizes her talent and helps her find her way. He is also, in a way, her romantic interest, although their eventual marriage is a postscript in the epilogue, and comes well after she has become famous. So it is hardly the “rescue” of a damsel. (I also thought their romance was not particularly romantic - it seemed built on a shared love of music rather than passion.)
The book is divided into six parts. The first is about her childhood, the second about her first stint in Chicago, the second about her voice lessons with a difficult teacher which leads to a crisis, the fourth, her experiences on a trip to cliff dwellings in the Southwest (sponsored by Ottenberg) that leads to the necessary epiphany, the fifth (the shortest) her decision to borrow money from Archie so she isn’t indebted to Ottenberg, and the final section, set ten years later, at the start of Thea’s career, where she reconnects with both Archie and Ottenberg and they are able to see her in a new light.
The book thus has a range of moods, from childhood innocence to a more jaded (and overworked) adulthood. Thea grows and changes, and struggles to retain her flame and passion - this is hardly a pure triumph narrative. The coming of age costs her in many ways, but any other path would have cost her more.
The characters, as in all Cather books, are wonderfully nuanced, and fully human. True to life, there are no clear answers, no inevitable paths, no purely happy endings. Everything is a tradeoff, nobody gets exactly what they want, and life’s hardships and tragedies affect everyone. This book doesn’t have the lurid murders or suicides of Oh! Pioneers or My Antonia, but it does have a few tragic deaths, insanity, unhappy marriages, racial prejudice, and plenty of small-town social politics.
As usual, there were so many great lines, so I have to quote a bunch.
Dr. Archie married young, and ended up with a woman who was unsuited to him and to marriage in general. Their unhappy marriage is one reason that Archie takes such an interest in Thea - she is the child his wife is unable or unwilling to have. Her obsession with cleanliness and absurd “frugality” makes his life miserable, she refuses to have visitors, and there is other evidence of mental illness on her part. Cather describes some of this in this early passage.
She was one of those people who are stingy without motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it. She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat and food made him more extravagant than he would have been had she made him comfortable. He never came home for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he could never get thick cream for his strawberries. Even when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in smooth, ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The butcher’s favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold Mrs. Archie. She felt no interest in food herself, and she hated to prepare it. She liked nothing better than to have Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days - he often went chiefly because he was hungry - and to be left alone to eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up from morning until night.
One of the things that bothers Thea about her hometown - and her family - is their prejudice against the Mexicans who live just outside of town. She is friends with “Spanish Johnny,” who is a virtuoso mandolin player, and his wife. But her older brothers look down on the Mexicans and make cutting comments. Eventually this is one of the reasons Thea leaves home and never returns, even for her parents’ funerals. While Cather retains some of the prejudices of her time, I am always struck by her perceptive compassion for minorities. Her description of Johnny’s response to an insult is spot on.
A Mexican learns to dive below insults or soar above them, after he crosses the border.
Dr. Archie is a great character, I think, intriguing for his weaknesses as for his strengths. It is interesting that he refuses to divorce his wife, despite his unhappiness, because of his feeling that it would be vulgar to do so. Cather also describes his relationship to religion in an interesting way. I know a number of people that fit this description.
The tenets of the Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long since ceased to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his concept of propriety.
By age fifteen, Thea has become a successful music teacher in Moonstone. This leads to another perceptive line in the book.
She liked the personal independence which was accorded her as a wage-earner.
She gains respect from her family and the others in her town as a result, and is allowed more freedom than the average young woman her age. I think this is an important point, and one reason I think it is important for women to have their own money, so to speak. It changes the dynamics of all relationships, from that of one’s marriage (which is more equal as the woman has more equal income), to the way that society in general treats one. And, for that matter, the degree to which a woman has to bend to the demands of others.
The death of Ray Kennedy is necessary for the plot, but it is still sad to see him go. I think Thea would have lost out by marrying him, but he is a decent and thoughtful guy, even if he never makes a success of himself. There are several passages where he and Thea (and often Johnny) talk about life, including this gem.
“But when you look at it another way, there are a lot of halfway people in this world who help the winners win and the failures fail. If a man stumbles, there’s plenty of people to push him down.”
She is only a minor character, but Thea’s older sister Anna serves as a foil for Thea. Where Thea is free-spirited and free-thinking, Anna is a religious bigot, narrow-minded, and racist. But Cather also understands where this comes from, and why it is attractive to Anna. Anna cannot handle the responsibility of thinking for herself.
Everything had to be interpreted for Anna. Her opinions about the smallest and most commonplace things were gleaned from the Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attractive to her in its natural state - indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of populate quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of human living…She had none of the delicacy that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.
Oof. That’s so many in the Fundie world I have known. There is a certain kind of personality which thrives in the Authoritarian Fundamentalist world, and it is Anna. That combination of giving the baleful glance to anything not understood, and the need for some authority to bless things before they can be accepted. Yeah, I have far too much experience with it.
Thea’s father is a preacher, and not an unpleasant one, although not exactly imaginative. Cather also describes another preacher in the second section - Thea goes to work for him to pay her room and board while in Chicago. I find the description of him to be amusing.
He was the only one of the family who went through the high school, and by the time he graduated he had already made up his mind to study for the ministry, because it seemed to him the least laborious of all callings. In so far as he could see, it was the only business in which there was practically no competition, in which a man was not all the time pitted against other men who were willing to work themselves to death.
I mentioned the racism of Thea’s family. Her mother is the best of the lot, even if imperfect. When Thea returns from Chicago for the summer (to earn enough to return), she goes to a dance at the Mexican hall, has a grand time, and gets slapped with social censure for mingling with her “inferiors.” An older brother makes a particularly nasty comment, and Thea’s mom steps in.
“That’s all right, Charley. Drop it there,” said Mrs. Kronborg. “No use spoiling your Sunday dinner with race prejudices. The Mexicans suit me and Thea very well. They are a useful people. Now you can just talk about something else.”
Mrs. Kronborg reminds me of a few people I have known, from my grandparents’ generation. They combine a genuine desire to be decent and non-bigoted with a winceworthy blindness about how they sound. Unfortunately, Mrs. Kronborg also is worried about Thea’s reputation, and privately warns her to stay away. This leads to the break with her family that eventually becomes permanent.
On her return to Chicago, Thea goes to study with Mr. Bowers, a talented but unsuccessful singer. Cather explains why.
His cold nature and academic methods were against him. His audiences were always aware of the contempt he felt for them. A dozen poorer singers succeeded, but Bowers did not. Bowers had all the qualities which go to make a good teacher - except generosity and warmth.
That’s very perceptive, if I say so myself. One thing I have to say about my own years as a violin student is that one can feel the chill from people like Bowers. This also has nothing to do with how strict a teacher is, or whether they are prickly or not. It is about the contempt, and the lack of genuine love for one’s students. I spent some time with one particular teacher, who was a definite old battleaxe (although a very short, round one) with a reputation for being hard on students. But she was no Bowers - she and I got along pretty well during my studenthood and afterward. She genuinely cared about her students underneath the prickly exterior, and we knew it. (I also will never forget when she got me a ticket to the LA Phil so we could see Anne-Sophie Mutter perform Mozart’s 3rd Violin Concerto.) I also have to say that all of the teachers I have had cared about their students, and I am deeply indebted to all of them for what they gave to me. In the end, while Thea learns a lot from Bowers, she has to make a break from him, and find a way to pursue her own inspiration.
I should mention one unexpected line in the book. I have taken up birding in my middle age - you can check out my birding photos on this blog. In a description of the scene in “Panther Canyon” (a fictionalized Walnut Canyon National Monument), she mentions “little brown birds.” This is in contrast to the swallows and other named birds. For those in the birding community, LBBs are the ubiquitous small birds that you can’t quite get the camera or binoculars on to identify. Until you do, they are LBBs.
The trip to Arizona was inspired by one that Cather herself took with her brother - another instance in this book that drew from her own life. Cather would become an ardent conservationist, and one of the first visitors to Mesa Verde National Park. In the book, this episode becomes the second turning point in Thea’s life. She nearly elopes with Fred, only to find out that he is already married (although long estranged) and unable to get a divorce. However, she also has the epiphany that enables her to go back to pursuing her dreams. Fred, whatever his flaws, remains her biggest cheerleader to the end of the book, and he often understands her better than she does herself. And this despite the fact that Thea rarely reveals herself to others directly. There is an exchange in the book that I think is fascinating.
“I had to be close, as you call it, or go under. But I didn’t know I had been like that since you came. I’ve had nothing to be close about. I haven’t thought about anything but having a good time with you. I’ve just drifted.”
“Yes, you drift like a rifle ball, my dear. It’s your - direction that I like best of all. Most fellows wouldn’t, you know. I’m unusual.”
I’m with Fred on this. I am the not-quite-as-unusual-as-they-used-to-be men who loves that my wife has a direction, a goal, aspirations apart from just being with me. I admire her dedication to her profession, and her drive. On a related note, Thea hesitates to be with Fred despite his assurances that he won’t tie her down, because she values her independence.
“It’s not that so much. It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and that your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there.”
I think more women feel this than they let on. This was my goal for marriage with Amanda - she needed to feel that her life was her own, and not just tied down to me and the kids. Of course we have responsibilities toward each other, and toward the kids. But there is still a degree to which her life is her own, every bit as much as mine is my own. And let’s be honest, men have always been able to say this to some degree. It is women who are expected to sacrifice their personhood.
There is another description that I want to mention. I have been through some crazy thunderstorms in the Southwest, and I have to tell you, they are intense, and like nothing else. I particularly recall the time in 2015 we got caught in one while on a ridge in Grand Staircase Escalante - by the time we got down, the trail was absolute mud and we took some tumbles. Cather writes a superb account of one. Thea and Fred barely make it down to one of the cliff dwellings before the storm breaks.
The green light grew murkier and murkier. The smaller vegetation was blotted out. The yuccas, the cedars, and pinons stood dark and rigid, like bronze. The swallows flew up with sharp, terrified twitterings. Even the quaking asps were still. While Fred and Thea watched from the doorway, the light changed to purple. Clouds of dark vapor, like chlorine gas, began to float down from the head of the canyon and hung between them and the cliff-houses in the opposite wall. Before they knew it, the wall itself had disappeared. The air was positively venomous-looking, and grew colder every minute. The thunder seemed to crash against one cliff, then against the other, and to go shrieking off into the inner canyon.
The moment the rain broke, it beat the vapors down. In the gulf before them the water fell in spouts, and dashed from the high cliffs overhead. It tore aspens and chokecherry bushes out of the ground and left the yuccas hanging by their tough roots. Only the little cedars stood black and unmoved in the torrents that fell from so far above. The rock chamber was full of fine spray from the streams of water that shot over the doorway.
For a musical depiction to match, there is Ferde Grofe…
Moving on, after this epiphany, Thea knows she has to go to Europe to perfect her craft. Although she chooses Dr. Archie for the loan, she also asks Fred to make sure Archie doesn’t lose out if she fails. Fred, coming from money, doesn’t quite understand how she thinks, although she is correct in her description of it. I love this exchange.
“Yes, there is one thing, and it’s a good deal to ask. If I get knocked out, or never get on, I’d like you to see that Dr. Archie gets his money back. I’m taking three thousand dollars of his.”
“Why, of course I shall. You may dismiss that from your mind. How fussy you are about money, Thea. You make such a point of it.” He turned sharply and walked to the windows.
Thea sat down in the chair he had quitted. “It’s only poor people who feel that way about money, and who are really honest,” she said gravely. “Sometimes I think that to be really honest, you must have been so poor that you’ve been tempted to steal.”
Another fascinating line comes from Mrs. Kronborg after she is widowed, and goes into an irreversible decline. She essentially gives up. Dr. Archie thinks that she would recover if Thea came back, but Thea has just gotten her first real job offer….in Germany, and you couldn’t exactly jump on a plane and fly back - it was a several week boat trip at best. So Thea chooses her opportunity, and Mrs. Kronborg never sees her before she dies. (And seems to die unnecessarily too.) In any case, her lament about children is haunting.
“Bringing up a family is not all it’s cracked up to be. The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go. I used to feel sorry that you had no family, doctor, but maybe you’re as well off.”
I do hope this isn’t true. All my children are bright, and I know some are eager to go pursue their dreams elsewhere in the world. But I hope to not lose them completely.
The final section is somewhat haunting, as you can see the remains of the old Thea - the loveable and vibrant girl - but also the ravages of time and a competitive career. Which, I suppose, is the story of life. I am not so optimistic as I was a decade or two decades ago. The ravages of time and our deteriorating politics, my ostracism from my religious tribe and my birth family, other events which have taken their toll - I am a different person, for better and worse. Here is one indication of the ways Thea has changed.
“My life is full of jealousies and disappointments, you know. You get to hating people who do contemptible work and who get on just as well as you do. There are many disappointments in my profession, and bitter, bitter contempts. If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.”
I’ll end with a comment by the author near the end, after Fred, Archie, and Thea’s Chicago piano teacher Mr. Harsanyi have witnessed a breakthrough performance by Thea. I think it is an underrated truth.
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
I’ll probably try for a more overtly queer book for next year, but The Song of the Lark confirmed for me just how much I love Willa Cather. Her writing is beautiful, and her observation of human nature never fails to be perceptive. Combine that with her deep sense of compassion and you have books that are a joy to read.
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