Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather--with Brian of Bookish!
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- Опубликовано: 12 дек 2023
- Join me as I talk about Willa Cather's final novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl with my very special guest Brian, of the channel @BookishTexan --as I continue this year's celebration of Hannah's Bookukkah.
My Willa Cather playlist: • Willa Cather
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Correction: Gone with the Wind was published four years before Cather's book, and the film adaptation came out one year before the publication of Sapphira.
Hanna, your Wiila Cather series is such a treasure. She is vastly under valued and under read. I read all her novels in the 1980s and you are bringing them (and Cather) alive again in such a pleasant way. Thank you.
Thank you so much! What a wonderful thing to say. I’d love to hear more about your reading. Did you have a favorite Cather novel back then?
One often retains special affection for the first book one reads of an author, even if later works have merits that eclipse the first.
In 1982 I set out to read all the books I could from 1922, that “annus mirabilis” of modern literature. And along with “Ulysses “The Wasteland,” “The Garden Party,” “Jacobs Room,” “Babbitt” and a hundred others Willa Cather’s “One of Ours” was among my reading. I loved it.
So though I can easily make the case “My Antonia” or “Death Comes for the Archbishop” are better books and richly deserve their canonical status of being among the classic novels of American Literature it is “One of Ours” that remains closest to my heart.
There’s a slight sense of moribund edge to Nebraska that makes me think William Carlos Williams might have been thinking of that state when he wrote “the pure products of America go crazy.” As far as Cather’s protagonist Claude goes maybe it’s that in a generational sense he should have been born to keep plunging ever westward to new frontiers in an unceasing quest but, by the time of his birth the frontier was gone.
Stuck in the heartland Claude flounders. Three times the word “Humiliation” appears in key passages about Claude and his source of humiliation is existence. Cather is brilliant in sketching the lineaments of Claude’s self-loathing, and even abjection (the word is Cather’s. And so Claude trudges on as a kind of dumbed-down Prufrock or Miniver Cheevey, but brought delightfully and sympathetically alive by Cather.
The sympathy makes endless sense for Claude, after all, was modelled He was, after all, after a relation of Cather’s whose sheer dullness was the source of real horror which gave way to far more complex feelings after his death in the War.
Cather writes: Claude’s eyebrows and long lashes were a pale corn-color - made his blue eyes seem lighter than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the sort of looking boy he didn’t want to be. He especially hated his head,- so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and uncompromisingly square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name was another source of humiliation. Claude: it was a “chump” name, like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country schools there was always a redheaded, warty-handed, runny-nosed little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he took for granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a farmer boy might be supposed to have.
And this:
Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself ; when he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt unclean and abject.
The word “abject” here is key. Cather Knew.
Two years before the book’s publication Ezra Pound had written in Hugh Selwin Mauberly about the idealized and naïve drive towards war:
some had fought for adventure, some quick to arm, some for love of slaughter in imagination learning later…”
It’s really my favorite Ellipsis in literature and into the space of that ellipses of just what it is the combatants learned by the tenth battlefield or return home is the subject of a thousand books.
Cather, through the words of Claud’s mother has pointed and eloquent words about what young people learned on the battlefields or the return home when they were doomed to be aliens even from their families living compartmentalized and even fragmented existences until finally the whisper comes “enough.” It is, in fact, one of the most harrowing passages ever written about the psychological costs of the war for those whose patriotic idealism awakened to a loss sense of all meaning in what they were doing and more critically and later, in what they had done. Cather understood the stakes and the costs.
She would have dreaded the awakening,- she sometimes even doubts whether he could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment. One by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership, leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers,- one by one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure lodging houses, some in their office, where they seemed to be carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a vessel’s side and disappear into the sea. When Claude’s mother hears of these things, she shudders and presses her hands tight over her breast, as if she had him there.
His mother takes comfort in the fact that Claude dies in the full flush of believing in heroism and the pure rightness of the warm. Literally the war had given Claude’s life meaning. But long before the war Claude’s self-loathing had turned to a real love of violence in imagination and this creates a grim subtext running throughout the book. Claude embodies Pound’s “Some quick to arm…for love of slaughter in imagination.” But he never had time to learn later.
Great book, and still my favorite Cather.
Hannah, I've enjoyed this Cather series with all these fun, smart friends. What a great project.
I LOVE this series you are doing. I appreciate the deep dive you are doing and opening up of Cather. I am so excited to read them all. I need analysis like these to help my understanding, it is absolutely the best way to grasp literature for me.
An intriguing discussion of what sounds like a complex book. Do I want to read a white author writing about slavery? And yet it is worth exploring the impact of slave owning on the Southern white community.
Very good discussion 😊
♥️
Great conversation, friends, and yes, a great book.
Cather's perception and intent in this book go very deep, yet this appears (at first glance) to be mostly a child's rosy recollection, little more than a nostalgic back glance at the lovely ante-bellum south. It may be nostalgic, but it's a bit more than that.
And this is not, in any way, another Gone With the Wind or a bodice ripper.
I think Brian is closer in his reading of Henry Colbert, the character. Yes, Henry is not his relatives, but he IS attracted to the mulatto Nancy, and he is not comfortable with being responsible for his wife's "property" brought up from Tidewater.
The relationship between Henry's wife, Nancy, and Henry's widowed daughter is at the heart of the book, and it is by no slight of hand that we are completely with Nancy. Cather shows Sapphira to be a moral monster without painting her as such. What an amazing character study.
I could go on and produce a couple more paragraphs telling why this book moves me so much given my own roots in the Carolinas (which likely no one cares to hear), but I will say this book captures the period very convincingly (Cather's childhood memories were obviously vivid), the names (like Capon Springs and Back Creek) and country descriptions are so beautiful woven together, and each character, but especially the black ones, are so believably realized that you miss them when you close the book. And Cather does not sugar coat by avoiding the n word or using the term "darkies". I suspect Cather remembered the conversations and language as much as the images.
Reviewers have visited the full spectrum of praise and vigorous condemnation over the years, with charges of condescension and racism being common, but I consider the book well worth the read and one that had something to say. But then, all of Cather's books can claim the latter. She was an American original.
Sounds very violent, buy very compelling, at the same time ("Silent Violence," or something, Hannah said) I bet I would like Cather 🤔
I would love to see a video where Black people are reviewing this book. I just finished it. It was challenging for me to get through.
@@walkinthewoods981 Yes! That would be a wonderful video! Cather’s work is a product of her own background and era. Have you ever considered making videos yourself? I would love to hear what you have to say!
@@HannahsBooks Sincere thanks for your response. This common saying about product of an era dismisses all the people born in her era that weren't racist and fought for the rights of all people. We are now in 2024 and many people still have the views of Willa Cather concerning black people. We see this across America and Europe. All of her black characters are animalistic, lazy, slow minded, sneaky, etc. she called Jezebel a monkey and a gorilla! That that is so easily dismissed is sad. Many whites tend to romanticize and have nostalgia concerning slavery. All things being the same, if Willa Cather was a black author, and white people were describe the way she described black people would you still feel the same way? Would she still be a favorite author? There was so much to say about this story. If this was just her views in one book, maybe I could say it isn't her views but in ALL her novels she writes about black people the exact same way. Nancy, because she was half white, was written with some sensitivity but when she had a weak moment it was referred to as her black half. I will ask book club friends to read this. But again thanks. It was the only review of this book that I could find.
It seems like this is an author I should know. I'm not sure I'd enjoy her work, but it seems like a chore potentially worth doing.
Give her a try! O Pioneers and My Antonia are both great places to start-and fairly short, too. I would love to hear what you think!
@@HannahsBooks Okay. Maybe I'll start it tomorrow, if I actually sleep. I didn't last night. Thank you.
@@melissamybubbles6139 Sending you lots of good sleepy thoughts…🥱😴
I read Cather’s novels O Pioneers and My Antonia and thoroughly enjoyed both - but then I picked up “Song of the Lark” and was so disappointed when the main character Thea uses racist language and behavior toward the Black employees of a New York Hotel. I don’t care if Cather was just reflecting her times, I doubt I’ll ever read another Cather novel. Same goes for F. Scott Fitzgerald. I agree that The Great Gatsby is a classic, but some of his other writing (e.g., short stories) exhibits the same ignorant racist attitudes. there are too many other authors to explore and appreciate.
I just picked up Library of America volume with _O Pioneers, Lark_ and _Antonia._ My understanding is they form a trilogy? I’ll try _Pioneers_ and see what I feel.
@davidnovakreadspoetry Technically yes-but only because they are all books about different women living on the prairie. In my opinion, there is no reason to read them together unless you explicitly want to compare them.