Willa Cather

Tonight we watched Song of the Lark, a movie about a woman who is born and raised in a small town in Colorado and becomes a famous soprano in Europe. We'd actually seen it before but I often forget that I've seen a movie and rent it again.

This time round I noticed that it was based on a novel by Willa Cather. Because I was born in a former British colony, most of the English literature that I was taught in school was British: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, Forster and Huxley with a few "great" Americans like Melville, Twain and James thrown in. So I missed out reading the "middle-brow" American writers like Cather.

When I first heard of Cather I asked my American friends about her. Their almost universal opinion was "Don't bother!" So I didn't. But, after seeing Song of the Lark again, I decided that maybe I should bother; so I Googled her. Now I understand why my friends in San Francisco didn't think she was any good: Cather was politically conservative and extolled the traditional frontier values of the West.

That made me wonder why she was not honored by conservatives. Could it be because she never married; that all of her most intimate friendships were with women (such as the Swedish-American opera singer Olive Fremstad whose life inspired Song of the Lark); that she sometimes dressed like a man and liked to be called "William"; that she had a long-term relationship with the New York editor Edith Lewis from 1912 until her death in 1947?

I think it's time for me to read some of Cather's novels.

PS Surprisingly, when novelist Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he said that Cather should have won the honor. Lewis of course is famous for his anti-capitalist satire Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry which depicts evangelical Christians as hypocrites. No wonder he was the first American to win the Nobel for Literature.