MUSIC, SILENCE, AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF WILLA CATHER1

Renascence, Winter 2005 by Giannone, Richard

Nothing really matters but living . . . Accomplishments are the ornaments of life, they come second. Sometimes people disappoint us, and sometimes we disappoint ourselves; but the thing is, to go right on living. (Lucy Gayhearf)

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Psalm 51:6)

WE can now say with confidence that Willa Gather numbers among the enduring writers of the recent century. Her name evokes the courage of immigrant farmers struggling with the raw American plains, and her reputation rests secure on her frontier masterpieces, which with miraculous economy and stylistic excellence capture a defining moment in the American experience. All of this is true, but not the deepest truth. For Gather's soul one must look elsewhere. Within her accounts of breaking fresh ground in a strange land stirs a search for the source and meaning of life. That pursuit gathers momentum through an inner negotiation, before and beneath the crops, that accounts for the harvest accomplished in the soil. Here in the quiet realm behind the brow lies the agency generating Gather's celebrated dramas. This power goes far and deep, for the passage that Gather's foreigners make is not simply a crossing from an old world to a new but an advance from an old state of things to a new one. Visible as crops and hidden as freedom, this newness is the founding condition that undergirds the diverse experiences of belief in Gather's writing.

Mindful of the subject's intricacy and aware that any assessment of an artist's inner life is necessarily provisory, imperfect, and beset with partisan engagement, in this essay I present Willa Gather as a writer of faith. The argument is selective, somewhat discursive, and, in the final section, personal. The exploration begins by observing two convergent habits of mind, aesthetic and religious, that Gather uses to grasp the ultimate ground of our being. To gauge their relation to each other as modes of belief, this discussion pairs The Professor's House (1925), Gather's challenge to the tenets of organized religion, with Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her celebration of creedal truth. After suggesting in Death Comes for the Archbishop certain qualities of the American desert that epitomize for Gather the inner trials of belief, the essay takes up Lucy Gayheart (1935) to study the nature of faith. Lucy Gayheart, Gather's penultimate novel, neither questions nor foregrounds the precepts of religion and thereby allows us to see what holds true when skeptical probing and established explanations do not avail.

Lucy Gayheart is the culminant interest of this essay. My approach to this book is eclectic. Because faith is inevitably a response to how the divine plan works in time, I include a reminder of the dismal historical condition of 1935 when Lucy Gayheart appeared. And because Gather invariably speaks from and to her own situation when telling a story, I also give passing attention to the personal gloom out of which Lucy Gayheart emerges. Darkness exerts a fruitful pressure on Lucy Gayheart. By telling a somber story of youthful death, Gather navigates public and private shadows to find hope. The essay, however, does not seek to offer either a new historical or biographical account of Lucy Gayheart. The trust that Gather comes to avow reaches the reader mainly through music - mainly, but not ultimately. In relation to faith, music in this novel has an added dimension, and I want to revisit Gather's reliance on music to show its service to belief. That aim entails going beyond sound to resonance. This supplementary vibration of the operas and songs Gather held dear leads to my eventual, true topic: silence and endurance. With stillness and survival uppermost in mind, the argument turns to Harry Gordon, that isolated and lonely figure of failure and authority upon whose sturdy shoulders Gather lays the burden of maintaining certainty in spite of fundamental uncertainties that characterize our period in religion as well as in all other realms of life. In tracing the movement of Harry Gordon's introspection, I consciously move away from the cool detachment expected of literary commentary to participate in Gather's presentation of faith that sustains one in present grief and allows one to face whatever is to come.

IF we step back to take a canonical view of Gather's fiction, we can see that in story after story, novel after novel, whatever the protagonist's gender or class, nationality or individual gift, whatever the particular aspiration, whether the struggle occurs in the grassy culverts of Shenandoah Valley or on parched stretches of New Mexico, whether the character is a person of action or of contemplation, whether the outcome of that endowment lifts or sinks the heart, two modes of creativity operate. Invariably, an aesthetic and a religious power shape the inner workings of the protagonist's spirit, with the balance between these forces varying according to the character's temperament.