Thursday - October 8, 2020 - Five authors of Greenwich Village, as told by Kate Alsbury: Willa Cather.
Each Thursday this month we’ll feature a piece from Kate Alsbury’s collection of snapshot historical essays of five authors who made their work, as well as their name, in Greenwich Village. This week’s feature looks back at Willa Cather’s time living, writing, and working in and around Washington Square Park; last week was a look back at John Updike’s house on West Thirteenth Street.
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Willa in Washington Square
One of the most prominent women writers of Greenwich Village, Willa Cather spent decades of her life in New York City. Known for her romantic style focusing on the hardships of the American West, she isn’t typically thought of as a New Yorker. Born in countrified Virginia in 1873, she found a refreshing change in some of the city’s most coveted real estate: Washington Square.
But New York wasn’t her first stop. She’d already experienced life in ‘small’ America and other large cities before settling here. When she was young, she moved with her family from Virginia to Nebraska, hoping to escape what some might have seen as oppressive conservatism, remaining there to study. In the 1890s, she returned to the East Coast, spending ten years in Pittsburgh as an editor and teacher before coming to New York at thirty-two.
A boarding house at 60 Washington Square South became her home for the next few years, possibly inspiring her story “Coming, Aphrodite!” –– the only one of her stories set in Greenwich. It follows two young artists (and a Boston bull terrier named Ceasar III) over a brief period as they struggle with their careers and society. She captures an idle afternoon moment near the park beautifully:
“After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog's health and watched the stages pull out; — that was almost the very last summer of the old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water which now and then blew south…”
The city’s character finds its way into several of Cather’s stories, like “My Mortal Enemy,” but doesn’t usually feature prominently.
Described as “Youngish, buoyant, not tall, rather square,” by a fellow writer, she was one in a league of artists who were attracted to the neighborhood by the desire to amend some of the same struggles her characters faced. Parts of the Village still offered affordable rent with easy access to restaurants and entertainment, and of course, the camaraderie of fellow artists.
The area supported creative professionals attempting to build a respectable career in their craft while supporting themselves with ‘jobbing’ roles as editors or magazine contributors. Diversity had not completely left the neighborhood yet. It was home to others seeking refuge of a different kind, lodging communities of working-class immigrants from Italy and other European countries. Her sympathy for them would become evident while she was editor at McClure’s Magazine.
After a dispute between one of the magazine’s founders and senior staff, she was offered the job she would remain at for the next six or seven years. She found herself quickly promoted to managing editor. Under her editorship, an exposé piece ran drawing attention to the plight of an Italian family living on Macdougal Street, authored by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and entitled, "Toilers of the Tenements.”
April Twilights, a collection of poetry divulging her love of nature, was published in 1903. A few years later in 1905, The Troll Garden, a collection of short stories, (some of which appeared in McClure’s) was published.
Strongly influenced by Village writers like Henry James, she would include essays about Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Edgar Allan Poe in a book, “A Collection of Stories, Reviews, and Essays,” published in 1908 — mostly written before she arrived in Greenwich.
The essays take the form of praise and criticism alike. She said of Poe: “In a careless reading one cannot realize the wonderful literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects that those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic enough to be our marvel when we are old.”
Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, ran as a serial in McClure’s before being printed as a novel in 1912.
Over the years, her permanent residence wouldn’t stray far from Greenwich, residing at 82 Washington Place, 5 Bank Street (1913-1927), and 35 Fifth Avenue, until finally heading uptown to Park Avenue later in life.
It isn’t difficult to imagine why Washington Square Park provided an uncommonly enticing place of respite for those looking to elude the drudgery and stifling scenes so commonplace. Especially to Cather and others accustomed to seeking the company of nature in strenuous times.
Living in the Village on and off for decades, she wasn’t a stranger to travel, visiting the Southwest and Québec. Her love for Greenwich and the west seems well matched. Dividing her time between the two, she found the struggles of rural life a stronger driver for storytelling.
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Kate Alsbury is a writer and marketing consultant. Her creative work has appeared in journals like Frogpond and Modern Haiku, along with several anthologies.
