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Willa Cather's Grave
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I learned today that Willa Cather's gravestone in Jaffrey, New Hampshire has the following inscription:
"That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great."
That sort of caught my eye when I read it and I did a little further digging in encyclopedia and on Google to see what they had to say about Willa.
Willa was born on 7 Dec 1873 and died 24 April 1947. She attended University and became an English teacher at high school in Pennsylvania. From the age of ten until adulthood she had lived in rural Nebraska. She was raised in the Baptist Church but withdrew from it and became an Episcopalian in 1922. Willa became an editor of a magazine (McClures) in NY
and later was promoted to Managing Editor.
Willa was a novelist. She wrote altogether about 12 novels of which I have read four. These are:
O Pioneers (1913)
My Antonia (1918)
Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927)
Shadows On The Rock (1931)
I think that "Death Comes For The Archbishop" is one of the top ten novels that I have ever read in my life and the other three novels that I read were also very good writing. Her novels were very sensitive and I liked all of them. I still have plans
to read a couple more of her works.
Some of her other novels were:
The Song Of The Lark (1915)
Alexander's Bridge (1912)
One Of Ours (1922)
Sapphira And The Slave Girl (1940)--I have this but haven't read it.
Willa frequently quoted the sentence above which is now on her gravestone and also frequently said:
"The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own."
So having read the novels noted above I knew nothing about Willa and assumed from her writing that she was a staid, delicate, demure little lady. That seems not to be the case.
At University Willa first got into trouble with the school authorities because she dressed as a man, cut her hair short in masculine style, smoked fine Cuban cigars endlessly , drank beer in great quatities at bars normally not frequented by ladies, carried a bottle of rum with her at nearly all times, and dearly loved a good fight with no holds barred and with the toughest men in the place. These were all activities which were not normally a part of the social scene for young ladies at University in the 1890s. At no point do my sources indicate that Willa was a lesbian but after reading a bit about her I came to the conclusion that she probably was.
So now that I have learned a bit about her background I am even more eager to read some more of her works and I continue to be puzzled by her gravestone inscription. It is not that I disagree with what it says but rather that I am surprised that Willa chose it for her gravestone:
"That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great."
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