Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, and Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels of the 1920s and Beyond

Abstract

In Willa Cather: A Memoir, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant makes Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather's life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to forefront. Describing Cather's in 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited Five Bank Street apartment, Edith Lewis, who now worked at J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said ... must have a first officer, who does a lot captain never knows about to steer boat through rocks and reefs. (212) This portrait of Lewis as domestic engineer, unobtrusively steering ship of Bank Street apartment, has appealed to subsequent biographers, but they never cite following sentence, which concludes Sergeant's brief portrait of Lewis: 'It takes two to write a book' was another line of [White's] creed (212). Sergeant does not explicitly apply White's maxim to Cather and Lewis, moving on instead to afternoon visits, when she found Cather alone (because Lewis was at office), but she nevertheless implies that Lewis collaborated in production of Cather's fiction. Rather than portray Lewis as collaborator, however, scholarship has long represented Cather as an autonomous and solitary author in Romantic tradition, creating in isolation and in opposition to modern social world. In The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism, Susan Rosowski claims that Cather privileges power of individual creative imagination to wrest personal salvation from an increasingly alien world (xi). Placing Cather in tradition of British Romantic forebears such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, Rosowski argues that she followed them in their separation of self and world, private and public (xi). Rosowski takes title of her study from one of Cather's early newspaper columns, in which she describes the voyage perilous of an idea way from brain to hand [to] transfer on paper a living thing with color, odor, sound, life all in it (qtd. in Rosowski 6). At an important stage in her creative process, Cather sat down with pen (or pencil) in hand or at a typewriter, transferring ideas to paper. However, as Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron argue in Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership, the agonizing loneliness of artistic and literary production.... wrenching pain of sitting alone in front of a blank page or a blank canvas is only one part of story of artistic creation, which end--or for that matter doesn't begin--there (12-13). Moreover, as Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson observe in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and Construction of Authorship, scholars must distinguish! I between ideology and practice, between powerful metaphors of lyric solitude, egotistical sublimity, and heroic individualism and surprising variety of creative practices incorporating that British Romantic poets employed (16). Crucial collective and social experiences occur before, concurrently with, and after isolated, individual moment of the voyage perilous. As Holly Laird argues in Women Coauthors, It would be difficult to find an author who has not written with someone else, whether under other writers' influence, with aid of editors' revisions, in response to generative conversation, or literally together with someone else (3). As she also argues, attentive readers will find collaboration ... itself reproduced and thematized in writing (4). In this essay, I reconstruct place of Lewis, with whom Cather shared an intimate partnership, in Cather's creative process, taking as a case study two of Cather's Southwestern novels, The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for Archbishop (1927). …