Shopping in Someone Else’s Intellectual Property, They Can’t Replicate Spirit

Edith Lewis, Willa Cather’s life partner and literary executor, was put in a strange situation with Willa just having passed in April 1947 and the circumstances surrounding Truman Capote’s structural plagiarism being published as Other Voices, Other Rooms the following year in 1948 from Willa Cather’s over-the-decades-more-flourishing-to-effervescence works, and with it he also crossing personal boundaries mimicking her biographical details such as riding on the back of a wagon (also in My Ántonia, a story that he would plagiarize again in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958, ten years later) to get to his own The Professor’s House which he then filled with his dark narcissism (his need to cause pain) and penned-in self, and years later, right upon the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, rushing to the prairies of Kansas (the day after the funerals, no less—just as he had done to Willa) for a sensational story that appeared out of nowhere but seemed to hold exactly for him intact Cather-esque Mid-West characters and situation already set-up as content for a story with the added “delight” that it was an unfathomable, deeply brutal, unsuspected strike on the unimaginable innocence of a nucleus family in the safety of their own home together that had his glands salivating, all for a superficially built stature and fame and the power of that shock and the power of that fame, not just for self-gratification and self-importance, but the power to cause harm, the sanctioned right to do it, and to continue it (free from judgment because in the public mind it is untouchable “fame” and further, “literature”). As part of the malignant narcissism, Truman would think that Edith, and even Alfred Knopf, Willa’s publisher, were powerless now that he was published, and he would relish that powerlessness and the power that it gave him as an “author.” He would then seek praise at every turn in order to keep that “stature” intact, untouchable. He would, according to the now-known patterns of extreme narcissism, think he knew best, better than them, and had “outwitted” them, and no matter to him, Willa was dead—writing off (quite literally) the value of others and their life’s works and the people who cared, and cared deeply. This is not to mention the shock of the public-approved injustice, an inherent feeling of wrongness being justified by fame. This is a look inside what the public wouldn’t be seeing with the superficial sensational headlines Truman was propagating every minute. Mix with this the other patterns such as that Truman never had any intention of stopping, as there was no problem: he was a celebrity and a celebrated “author,” and in his mind he was “special.”  It appears to be just as any other artist or creator working his way up to being sensational. It is not, at all.

And here is the rub of the situation right upon Willa’s passing: Edith would look nuts to talk about it, with an established author such as Willa Cather and Edith is suddenly interested in talking about someone young like Truman Capote ‘with his first novel’ right upon her death, “What is she,” the outraged collective-mind press would ask, “super insecure and jealous?” Because malignant narcissism is the unseen—no offense to actual beautiful snakes—but the rattlesnake who is enjoying being in the grass and the manipulation it can bring. It has created its unnatural habitat right in the press and in “literati.”

What this brings about is a very strange pressurized situation where now unseen, unexplainable adversity is threatening not life or death, but the heart of an art, a life expressive of it, given to it, and people can’t tell the difference. Now try telling that to the press! They would say, “It sold one billion copies, go jump off.” And here is where you have to decide how much you care—and how willing you are to put your neck out there for what matters. And now, you have to do it without saying a word. You can’t tell anyone they are playing with a rattlesnake. That doesn’t matter, actually. Play away! It’s ‘only’ the heart of the art that’s carrying you. And the snake is only interested in the best and the brightest and the shock value of those assets. Money and titillation can be thrown at everyone else. Empathy is no where in sight, and it’s a cold, cold game. All because someone undeserving and unearned wanted to take what you have and got public permission to do it.

What is the difference? The soul of the artist and the soul of the work. One has no original content because there’s nothing inside but venom. It takes what it wants in hidden ways.

Now, regrettably, I had to kill a rattlesnake once. I lived out alone on a ranch, out in the middle of everywhere/nowhere like Willa had done, I was alone on 606 acres of Southwest Texas and a rattlesnake had taken up residence underneath my house, likely to give birth there to more, and I had a little Yorkie and small animals. One evening the rattlesnake and I accidentally faced off behind the house. I’d also come into contact with a very deadly coral snake before in my yard, but it minded its business and so I minded mine, and there wasn’t anything I could do about that under the circumstances. But the rattlesnake saw me and her head was up in the air already and the rattles were going. Damn. I took a long way around her and got my inherited shotgun. I don’t shoot guns. It was just given to me because it was my grandfather’s. For about an hour she and I contemplated where our homes were, looking at each other. Now, I wish I had scared her off and figured out how to keep her from going under the house in a less caustic way, but at that moment my dogs were in danger. I believe it is the only time I’ve ever pulled the trigger on a firearm at a living thing, but after much, much deliberation. Afterwards when I called my dad he told me to stretch her out and count the rattles and the length. I was astonished. She was huge. Well, we spent a moment of our lives together, contemplating what was to be done. I’m not a killer, I am deeply, deeply, a protector. But once, I killed a rattlesnake.

Back to the difference. It was now Edith’s responsibility to do something without being able to talk it over with Willa. For Willa had also faced it off before, not this extreme dark personal malignant narcissism that grows like a cancer on someone’s life, biographical details, and intellectual property, but cultural narcissism, over long years contemplating how to approach the situation when the men considered the ‘greats’ had raided her work. (Yes, Willa, too, early on had seen Henry James as her literary precedent.) And here is where it comes down to the heart of the matter. Willa didn’t become a writer to prove she was better than anyone. The stakes were there and it made no less or more of her contribution. Certainly being great was a question, but it was up to her to express her own soul, and with that, the souls of those whom she could possibly articulate also, opening up an understanding, this experience into phenomenal new insight, personhood, place, and experience, transforming them into gorgeous, new recognition. Then one can lay down the comparison of ‘great’ and be amazed, delighted, even rolling in elation in the realization, the power of the art. It just so happens that Fitzgerald and Faulkner in taking from her works had missed her mark and she knew it. Her vision was further, very thought out, very structured, very felt. She offered no reprimand, no assertion of power, and not just because she was female, but because she could see further. She offered herself to further art, further life to prove the art true, to prove the inspiration and vision.

And so for Edith Lewis, as evidence in her words and actions show in that moment, the adversity and the celebration of that malignancy made the facilitating of the understanding of the difference even more necessary. The work would stand, very well survive, but the understanding could get lost in the minutiae of press also very much missing the mark.

Willa herself knew the importance of the articulation surrounding her life’s work, contacting and corresponding at the end of her life with a scholar E.K. Brown who had expressed her very well. As accomplished artists know, no matter what dedication they’ve given, there are many, many in the press who don’t get it, they just aren’t in the place to get it, but they go to press anyway. It’s a consideration of one’s art that stands apart from the art itself. It was Truman’s obsession and preoccupation, how much publicity he was getting. Now Edith had to make it hers for the right thing to happen. There was no question that Willa’s life and work was worth giving oneself to and seeing it through.

And so in this vein one can see what Edith starting writing and doing in that moment was not into proving how great Willa was or why the works should be considered great, what power or what standing they should have, but what a huge difference Willa and her works make: the very personal to the very enormous contribution that it would be a huge mistake to not get—the genius that lives on and delivers that very alive inspiration and how that happens. That very thing, that alive Being, that alive inspiration, is the only way that could prove the difference, the difference in Being, the difference in what value it holds, why not to just follow the manipulated fame and the press, but to know the soul of the thing, how to touch the eternity of it, how to draw it into one’s own life, as pure realization and breath, and, as shocking as newly realized Being, newly realized Place, newly realized structure, dimension, reach—inner, not population size. To know the other kind of “being” is actually a dead end. And so there was the mundane experience of run-of-the-mill publicity and self-promotion and there was the realm of art, and the question of how to act on that, the now necessity of furthering the art’s and the artist’s soul. The negative brought about the energetic circumstance to need to open humanity to get the art through. Otherwise one could say, well she wrote the books, and that is enough.

As I wrote in “[ . . . ] As We Dream by the Fire: Breakfast at Tiffany’s in Los Angeles,” these circumstances pushed the creators of the movie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to buy from Truman the “rights” to make the film of his plagiarism (as Willa had specified that her works were not to go to film anymore), an induced necessity of putting Willa’s works to the screen, and thus their arrival to Audrey Hepburn who in spirit would take a stand, could not not take a stand, to make a cultural difference, in fact, that would come to demonstrate this very thing, the difference of her Beingness and Truman’s locked state of endless publicity and loaded harm, actually forcing Audrey to do something timeless and in that also further a very natural path of Willa’s works being opened more complete towards Beingness and actual realization. Ten years before, at that very moment when Edith was dealing with Truman’s publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms, oddly the movie All About Eve (1950) was being made starring Bette Davis. Narcissism and manipulation wasn’t unheard of. Dealing with it, the movie also shows, had to be. The public just didn’t think it could happen to them, even though the movie shows how easily slithery it is—a warning to an awakening. Somehow in the natural course of realization when Truman pressed the plagiarism of Willa further with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Willa’s works moved back across the land to the continent’s furthest arrival and to an actuality of creativity and spirit and its art and its realization into the flesh because it had to, because the artists had to. It facilitated intense anger in Truman. And that’s what the public had gotten themselves in for. The artists had to see to it differently. One way was very dark, and one way was to the light.

Edith laid out her thoughts in 1948 that give insight into how she saw to proceed. She carefully states in her Preface looking back in 1952 of what was most important: she had started by writing down the personal notes, the personal narrative about Willa’s life as they flowed from her for E. K. Brown whom she had very importantly asked to do Willa’s official critical biography—about Willa’s works themselves—thus providing to him technically how and when the works were written to go alongside his inspired critical analysis, but then decided with Alfred Knopf to publish them both together: the personal aspect of having witnessed Willa the artist herself, and the insights of a genius and sensitive scholar about the art. These two witnesses were what would show the difference: the Being and the art, with the art then being allowed to carry it. Edith wrote, “but with the feeling that it is not in any form of biographical writing, but in art alone, that the deepest truth about human beings is to be found.” In this it was a push to look at the spirit of the thing. Let it truly speak what it is. These two things then were to assist in letting it speak and to draw attention to how it speaks. When Truman had his covertly hidden stinger out looking for his induced opening for more sensational publicity and opportunity for his snide, dismissive, better-than-thou comments to be repeated endlessly, feeding on and looking for contention, Edith was saying, let’s give this very real thing safe passage to get the eternal through. The art will carry.

She and Alfred Knopf chose E. K. Brown for the critical biography because an article he had written about Willa’s work had inspired Willa herself recently and Willa had uncharacteristically reached out to him. His insights and his credentials, though, speak volumes as to what would have also ignited Willa to him. She would have been drawn to his extensive knowledge of French and his carefulness. Scholar Robert Thacker wrote of him,

“Brown was self-selected for the task. Born in Toronto in 1905, he was educated at the University of Toronto and at the Sorbonne, where he took a doctorate-és-lettres, a degree seldom earned by non-Francophones owing to the stringent French required, and one requiring two theses, a major (on Wharton) and a minor (on Matthew Arnold). (Another student in Paris, embarked on the same program and also with Canadian roots, was Leon Edel. He and Brown became good friends then.)

During that extraordinary education in France, E. K. Brown had arrived, amidst the depths of all the world’s great literature, remarkably, to Willa’s novels where according to Leon Edel, he read and reread them:

He read and reread the works of Willa Cather with an ever growing interest. His thumbed and worn copies of the novels are marked and underlined with the signs of his close perusal; and at the end of some of them he jotted down the dates of his rereadings. There is a characteristic expression of his firm belief in the value of rereading in the first of his Alexander lectures, Rhythm in the Novel, delivered in Toronto little more than a year before the end:

“One of the most illuminating remarks I remember was overheard at a public examination for the licentiate in English at the Sorbonne. The examiner was Émile Legouis. He asked a young man for his impression of education at English and American universities. The student replied that what had impressed him most was the amount of reading expected and accomplished. "Yes," said Legouis, "yes, they read, read, read." He was silent for a full minute. "It would appear," he mused, "that they find something magical in reading."

And Brown added his own comment that "there is nothing magical in reading: it is in rereading that some magic may lie."

Leon Edel pointed out that even as E. K. Brown at the age of forty-five had learned of his own impending death from brain cancer, continued on deeply, intently, writing about Willa:

How he came to write this biography he has related in his uncompleted introduction. The story he could not tell was how, face to face with death, knowing that his years were to be shortened, he continued to write—and to write admirably—in the supreme belief that man must pursue his appointed task to the end. Like "Neighbour Rosicky" he had his intimation. There may have been moments of deep inner suffering, of fear before the unknown; but outwardly this was not visible. Scholars, by nature, are not addicted to heroic attitudes; they have none of the swagger of men of action or the boundless physical energy of indefatigable adventurers. The quiet corner, the book, an adequate supply of paper, a well-filled inkpot or convenient typewriter, a pipe or a cigarette and they can conquer worlds. But this doesn't mean that they lack the stuff of heroism. Edward Brown was made of such stuff: he did not allow the supreme warning to discourage him from writing the book he had planned. At his desk the work grew methodically and without a flagging of purpose or style; there was never any divergence from the high critical standards he had always set for himself and there is no trace of hurry in the manuscript. He wrote with all the craft and subtlety—and urbanity—he possessed, catching Willa Cather's "vision of essences" [ . . . ].

Leon Edel would have to finish the work when Brown unexpectedly passed while working on the manuscript. Brown’s and then Edel’s brilliance could open what Willa had done.

This is also when Edith contacted Stephen Tennant in England for the Preface to a collection of non-fiction of Willa’s own words that would become Willa Cather On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art, allowing her to speak herself to the difference and inspiration in her own writing, and while Edith was writing the difference herself in her own notes that would become Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, Stephen was then also very distinctly and very carefully, eloquently putting to words the difference and how to know it. This was not just a collective epitaph. This was a coordinated, purposeful movement about the importance of the writing and the spirit therein and how to move it through into cognizance of its value. Those works are also inspired. It did matter to move it past the publicity of plagiarism. Stephen wrote: “It is her particular gift to reveal the reader’s finest being to his own cognizance and to bring the outer world, daily life, casual experience, into a curiously close relation to this self-knowledge.”

For Edith it was also in the personal experience. She wrote of Willa:

They were dark blue eyes, with dark lashes; and I know no way of describing them, except to say that they were the eyes of genius. I have never met any very gifted person who did not have extraordinary eyes. Many people’s eyes,  I have noticed, are half opaque; they conceal, as much as they express, their owner’s personality, and thought, feeling, struggle through them like light through a clouded sky. But Willa Cather’s eyes were like a direct communication of spirit. The whole of herself was in her look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know everything there was to be known about herself and you.

So why was Truman’s destructive narcissism not recognized for what it is despite its darkening luminary publicity glow and Truman on his death bed in 1984 still claiming a personal relationship with Willa (purposefully putting himself up next to his “friend” Stephen Tennant’s very documented close personal relationship with Willa and changing details of his story) to validate and continue to cover up his lack of self and art (that lack has the sting!)—that without saying a word all these authors refute in both spirit and practice by demonstrating that his spirit and spirit of art is nothing like Willa’s, is the opposite of Willa’s, and even by stealing her words—why did fame, accolades, sales, reputation, publishing rights, accepted public opinion, and Wikipedias persist with the harms, crimes, and lies, even past what Audrey had quietly but audaciously done that still outshines it extraordinarily brightly for all time?

Because the stakes have to come to their highest personally, cognizance is not instantaneous despite evidence and even insight, popular opinion is not broken by truth, but by the very thing Truman was pushing so viciously and adamantly for: the shock of looking for oneself into the face of what has been pulled on you personally, the gullibility, the innocence that it could be pulled on you, too, it’s the gasp he wanted, ‘Look, I’ve murdered you, in your own bed, and you didn’t see me coming, even though I told you. Me! Look how powerful and important I am, the most powerful. I had everyone. And the door was even unlocked, and no one could stop me.” What was done to Willa did not spare you. With a malignant narcissist “no one gets out alive,” not even the art.

A true artist can say, “Look over here, I’m showing you eternity. I’m carefully giving you the gorgeous beauty and insight of my whole life, my whole Being, and there’s something extraordinary to finally see about us, about our own existences,” but would you know the difference? Would you have the gift they gave you to see you through?