In ‘My Antonia’, Willa Cather’s third
novel about European pioneers
on the Great Plains, and first published in
1918, Antonia’s father,
failing at farming the prairie, longing
for his old life as a musician
in Catholic Bohemia, kills himself.
Denied his burial on consecrated ground
his wife, a bitter woman, has him interred
at the south west corner of their small plot of land,
where two tracks meet – like the old country,
where suicides were buried at a cross roads.
In time, what was unfenced wilderness marked
by stakes, and ways marked by wagon wheels, becomes
ordered farmland and levelled roads. Fenced now,
enclosed with the last of the red prairie grass,
the grave remains untouched. The roads curve round it.
***
Shortly after the publication
of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896,
Willa Cather became, as she put it,
‘Housman’s bond slave, mentally’. Whenever,
wherever she could, she promoted the work
in the magazines she edited.
She acknowledged that his poetry
made its way freely throughout her own work.
In 1902 she went on a tour
of Europe with a friend. First stop, more or less,
was the county of Shropshire. They visited
most of the places mentioned in the poems –
like Ludlow, Wenlock Edge, the Wrekin, and Clee –
sometimes more than once, but could find no trace
of Housman, or anyone who had ever
heard of him. The single copy of the book
in Shrewsbury’s public library was uncut.
Eventually, she got Housman’s address:
a boarding house in Pinner near London.
Willa went with two friends. Imagine three young,
outward-going women, passionately
convinced that Housman had written the only
verse in English from the previous decade
that would last, that it was as remarkable
technically as it was in the ‘truth
of its sentiment’. Imagine Housman,
middle-aged, lonely, forever carrying
a secret close to the surface of his heart:
his unrequited love for another man.
Later, Cather, in a letter to a friend,
described Housman – ‘as the most gaunt and grey
and embittered individual I know’.
She went on to say, ‘The poor man’s shoes and cuffs
and the state of the carpet in his little
hole of a study gave me a fit
of dark depression’. After they had left,
she had wept on the pavement outside the house.
***
‘…the grave, with its tall red grass that was never
mowed, was like a little island; and at
twilight, under a new moon or the clear
evening star, the dusty roads used to look
like soft grey rivers flowing past it…’
By David Selzer