When Willa Cather was writing The Professor's House (1925) she was constructing together a real history (breaking open the former stories and the way they are delivered), and sewing it together with the role of the seamstress and the construction of the dresses on forms with the conceivability of a different role and a different embodiment of the feminine, the professor's and the seamstress's papers layered and interwoven together, as scholar Marc Chénetier pointed out, in the very act of her own writing--she the professor and seamstress, creating a completely different structure of the whole right from her own existence in the brilliant act of heroic creation.
Eudora Welty, a master at it too, looked into what Willa was doing as well. Here are notes on what elements Willa's process, an apotheosis contained in and coming from her pages.
Sacramento Mountains, Alto, New Mexico
Spring 2025
A. First, and above all, immense, heroic passion, how deeply one feels about it, "impelled" in Eudora Welty's words, mixed with a lot of longing, not appetite.
B. Willing to give one’s life to it, and to everyone who benefits from it, deriving peace and joy from that.
C. Its relationship to time is the same as its construction: “There is no recent past, there is no middle distance.” It is the individual set on the present landscape of the eternal, and therein is the revelation, the goal, and from which the art arises.
D. After the art and artist have given everything away in it, there is an unexpected sacred gold held in reserve.
E. The forgery will be tied to time; it will unsuspectingly always show signs of it.*
F. Eternal art becomes more truthful all the time. It works its way to truth because the truth is what it adores.
G. The artist believes in the art and artist as heroic. It believes in the wild adventures of heroes and heroines giving their lives to art. It knows where to find them.
H. If it is constructed, it is embodied; the artist is writing the map, the river, the blue print from knowing oneself, which will also deliver embodiment.
I. The realization of Place is the truth. The realization is from the rock beneath the feet.
[Works Cited: Euroda Welty on Willa Cather in “The House of Willa Cather” and *Marc Chénetier’s Keynote Speech at the Sorbonne, “Shadows of a Rock: Translating Willa Cather"]