The Song of the Lark - Cather
Audio Performance by Barbara Caruso - (3 stars)
4 stars

This book is part of Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy. It begins with Thea Kronberg’s childhood in a small Colorado town and follows her life as she leaves her small town roots behind her to pursue a successful singing career. The book has Cather’s wonderful descriptions of the landscape and the community, but mostly it is an intense character study.

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

I think that quote may be at the root of my mixed feelings about this book. Most of the time I liked Thea. I admired her dedication and her persistence as she continued to grow as an artist. She works hard and sacrifices her own happiness to achieve a level of perfection with no guarantee that she will ever succeed. Her own high standards of perfection leave her frustrated and dissatisfied much of the time.

At other times I disliked her inherent narcissism. This book is said to be Cather’s most autobiographical, so it may be the author’s narcissism that makes me uncomfortable. She seems to say, in more ways than one throughout the story, that anyone who isn’t a great artist cannot possibly understand. Human population is divided between the great artists and ‘the stupid’.

My sympathy lies with the characters who loved and cared for Thea Kronberg; her mother, Dr. Archie, and her lover, Fred Ottenburg. Thea isn’t without feeling for the people who care for her, but she will always put her artistic needs before anything or anyone else. ( )

I loved much of this book, but was not infatuated with the latter stages, after Thea (the main character) achieves the success she'd so long sought. Thea can be heartlessly self-serving in pursuit of her dream, and one almost expects Cather to emphasize the tragic nature of the trade-offs she had to make, but Cather never really goes there. Yet there is something tragic about Thea, about Archie, and about the losses that each must endure. Meanwhile, Fred (Thea's suitor) is the weakest and most unreal character in the book. When the novel's brief epilogue takes us back to Moonstone, Colorado, the setting of the first half of the book, the reader feels refreshed and alive again, after the dreary scenes in New York parlors and opera houses. ( )

Published in 1915, this is a beautifully written novel about the life of Thea Kronberg, a feisty female protagonist who overcomes the social restrictions of the time and eventually makes her mark as an opera singer. It opens in the 1890s, when Thea is eleven years old. She is one of seven children born to a Scandinavian immigrant family in the small (fictional) town of Moonstone, Colorado. She learns piano and gives lessons. She eventually moves to Chicago to pursue vocal performance education.

This book is the second in the Great Plains trilogy (along with O Pioneers! and My Antonia), Willa Cather’s narratives of strong women in the American West, but it can easily be read as a standalone. One of Cather’s strengths is the ability to vividly depict the landscapes of the places Thea visits. It is an early example of relationships in which the men in the story admire the woman for her ambition and talents and help her achieve her goals. It has aged well. I can see why it is considered a classic. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Somewhat autobiographical tale of a young girl who pursue her operatic talents, taking her from Colorado, to Chicago, and the to Europe and the Met. Good read." ( )

I fell in love with The Song of the Lark the first time I read it about twenty years ago. I was in my twenties and read it for a graduate seminar. As a budding feminist, I was captivated by the depiction of a young girl who has talent and passion and who pursues her dreams into adulthood, eventually achieving great success in her field. She didn't give it all up to get married or die tragically young. I admired how Cather slowed the action down to detail the influences in Thea's younger life, her hard work, and the sacrifices that she made for her art. My favorite part of the book remains Part IV: The Ancient People. I think it's one of the most beautiful and unusual pieces in American literature and I've often re-read that section just for the pleasure of it.

With this reading I was blown away by the character of the tramp. It's not that he commits suicide by drowning himself in the well and contaminating the town water supply with typhoid that captured my imagination, but the fact that he performs as a clown. As someone who used my high school math classes back in the early 80s as time to read the latest Stephen King novel, I can't believe I didn't pick up on the utter creepiness of the tramp as clown in my earlier reading. From the first scene where Thea watches him walk into town and can smell him from the safety of her porch, it's pretty unsettling. You know he's a bad omen. But then Thea catches his smell and covers her nose with her handkerchief: "A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it." The tramps notices her disgust, looks away, "and shuffled a little faster" past her house. In a horror novel, Thea would have been a marked woman. A few days later Thea sees him performing in front of one of the saloons: "his bony body grotesquely attired in a clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--and his eyes wild and feverish." Part of me feels compassion for the man, but I also hear horror music screeching in the background. Cather so gracefully creates a powerful, yet subtle aura of horror with this character. It makes me wish she would have tried her hand at the ghost story.
More interested than ever to see this.

Overall, however, I admit that it was hard for me to get through The Song of the Lark this time. Part of the problem was I started reading it in ebook format and that was just not a good fit for me with this novel. Once I switched over to a hard copy the reading went a bit better, but the book still wore me out at times. I'm still pondering whether that's due to the variety of literary styles and imagery Cather used or whether it boils down to the fact that I no longer admire the myth or archetype of the Great Artist who gives up their humanity for their art.

One of the big discussions that I recall from the seminar where I first encountered Thea, was whether or not Thea is selfish, and whether we'd even ask such a question if the story were about a man. From my twenty-something perspective, I did not think Thea was selfish. I thought her drive and self-discipline was admirable. I was excited by her commitment to her passion and figured her mom understood why Thea did not come home to visit when she was on her deathbed. And it's not like she's begging Dr. Archie and Ottenburg to flutter about like they do. With this reading I saw the older Thea not so much as selfish, but as heartless and cold.

In her preface to the Autograph Edition in 1937 Cather wrote that she was portraying one type of artist, the type whose "personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer." I was relieved to read this because it means that perhaps there are healthier and happier ways to be an artist. One doesn't have to end up a washed-up alcoholic like Wunsch, or be driven periodically insane by one's passion like Spanish Johnny, or live in emotional isolation like Thea. Or--shudder--end up completely mad like the clown. ( )