by Lionel Rolfe

G21 Contributing Editor

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LOS ANGELES, CA, USA - I had read some of Willa's books, and I was particularly taken by Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Later in life, when I began to write about writers, I was too busy focusing on California bohemian writers like Samuel Clemens and Jack London to go off on a tangent about my mother's "Aunt Willa." I was also taken with left-wing writers, and Willa was one of those who railed on against FDR.

There was even a tinge of racism in some of her writings, especially before she got to know people of other races. She was a product of her times, for better or for worse.

Willa loved tradition, in religion and in culture. Although she was not a Catholic, she was attracted to the trappings of tradition in Catholicism. That is why she was able to produce a book much beloved by Catholics: Death Comes to the Archbishop.

But she had bohemian links as well. For example, Cather had a friendship with Mary Austin, the histrionic but somewhat talented writer who was part of the California bohemian movement, especially when Austin was in residence at its Carmel colony which became its headquarters after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

It was only many years later that I began to realize that my mother's "Aunt Willa" was not just some crazy aunt. She was an incredible artist and writer with a profound, if not easily analyzed, connection to music.

Willa was no musical snob. She loved a wide range of music, from the music made by the itinerant Mexican workers who lived with their families on the plains in the 19th century, to opera and chamber music. She wrote a particularly powerful account of a black pianist playing jazz. But she first loved opera and then as a result of her friendship with the Menuhins, at least in part, she came to love chamber music.

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As I was writing this book, and was assembling my Cather books and papers, an amazing coincidence struck me. I discovered that I had used a couple of Cather's story titles in my own writing about pivotal events in my life without realizing where they may have come from. I had written about a place I always called "The Bluff," whereas she wrote about "An Enchanted Bluff" in the Southwest desert. I also wrote, as she had, about a "Death in the Desert" in a couple of chapters in my book Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground. They were not the same stories, but the similarity of titles astonished me. I remember feeling smug at having come up with such good titles, only to then realize I had not just pulled them out of the air.

It was not easy thinking that "Aunt Willa" was also a great writer. References to her were so commonplace in my home that I felt her presence in nearly everything connected to my mother.

To my mother, Willa Cather was the woman who had taught her what art was, what being an artist meant, and what the search for Truth was about -- whether on the piano or typewriter keyboard.

Shortly before she died my mother and I had a surprisingly acrimonious and personal argument [concerning] the subject.

She had apparently been disappointed most of her life that I did not continue studying the classical guitar. She felt I was good at it -- a conclusion with which I disagreed.

My mother adamant ly insisted that words can never convey great depth and move one emotionally and intellectually in the way that music can. They cannot duplicate the rapture of a great musical moment.

"What good does talking and arguing do?" she asked me. She looked meaningfully at me, since I am indeed given to talking and arguing sometimes.

"What about people who use words like Aunt Willa did?" I shot back.

I reminded her that Aunt Willa used words, and that her words had often had melody and rhythm in the same way an orchestra does.

My mother had no answer to this, and she obviously was thinking about the implications of what I'd said.

It makes me sad that my mother and I never really finished our conversation about words and music, which would have allowed us to get beyond the anger and personal disappointments to the thing itself.

But the simple truth was that she put music on the highest plain of human endeavor, and pegged everything else on a lower level.

On the occasion when my mom and I last argued, I wished I had asked her more about what made Willa's writing as elevated as music. I know she would have had an interesting answer.

Words, like notes, have sounds, colorations, are short and brutal or long and lingering. There is physics and arithmetic in harmony not normally easily communicated in writing. Yet somehow Willa had music in her writing.

Cather's role as a teacher to the Menuhin children was quite specific. She introduced literature into the "curriculum" side by side with music.

And in the process, the music no doubt fed Willa; and her literature affected the music. To interpret a piece of music, it is mandatory to know the Zeitgeist -- the ideas, passions, institutions and habits of a specific era. Understanding literature helped the children understand the music they played. In Willa's case, she put the music into her writing.

Certainly writing is not so abstract as music, although words, of course, do have shape and melody and color and even harmony of their own -- at least in a few authors. Writing usually comes out of the real world, and for the Menuhins, Cather was happy to put away her characters and work her magic on them instead.

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Willa was never fond of Lucy Gayheart, for example, the character she created in the novel by the same name. Yaltah was seeing a great deal of Willa when she was writing Lucy, much more so than her brother or sister. Willa loved all of them, however, and had strong relationships with Yehudi and Hephzibah as well. Her love of the children was also made all the more intense by the fact she was getting no joy from her writing. She wrote by hand and then a secretary typed up the manuscript. She was in constant pain with a wrist ailment.

Lucy was a young pianist who is not quite able to come to terms with life and love in the big city or the little town.

The book was important among Cather's books, even if it didn't quite have the power of some of her earlier works. Cather was revisiting old themes with Lucy. In The Song of the Lark, published in 1915, Thea Kronberg was a musician who left the plains and went to the big city. Lucy did not have the grit and substance of Thea, however, and the contrast between the two is fascinating. Lucy was not a great musician, but she was some kind of intense life force.

In much the same way that Willa was often the voice of the narrator in her books, she also was part of Yaltah's internal life.

Perhaps Yaltah was Willa Cather's greatest character -- not a character she had created on paper, but a character she molded in real life. ?Forget My Antonia, or Lucy Gayheart or The Song of the Lark. These and other books like O Pioneers! or Death Comes for the Archbishop were only that -- fiction. Everything Yaltah came to believe, and her lifelong struggle as a musician, was inspired by the teachings of her mentor Aunt Willa.

One wonders if Willa pondered the difference between the flesh and blood Yaltah and the character Lucy, who were both with her at the same time, and that is why she felt so much frustration with Lucy.

The intensity of the relationship between the two was brought back to me on an occasion in the early 1980s when my mother gave me Aunt Willa's letters to sell.

"Aunt Willa would have wanted me to give them to you because she would have supported your struggles as a writer," she told me when she mailed them to me in Los Angeles from London.

I was exceptionally broke at the time and what Yaltah did floored me. She didn't even insure the letters -- she just mailed them in an ordinary envelope -- letters, as it turned out, that were worth thousands of dollars.

I was shocked because scholars had been besieging her for years to be allowed to read the letters. She kept them in a shoe box in a closet in London. She never let the academics read them, for she respected Willa's desire that no one should ever read her letters. But after Cather's partner Edith Lewis died, I guess her thoughts changed.

"Willa would have approved," she said. "You were the one who saved those letters when I divorced your father," she said.

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One morning -- sometime in the late 1950s -- my mom and I were walking through Central Park and she pointed up at a beautiful old building. She told me it was where Aunt Willa had lived with Edith Lewis, her companion.

I asked Yaltah if she thought Willa was a lesbian, as had been rumored.

My mother said she didn't think so. But of course she met Aunt Willa in Paris when the author was approaching fifty and she was under ten years of age -- an age when the peculiarities of sexual attraction are not well understood.

Of course Yaltah was becoming an adolescent during the most intense parts of her friendship with Willa, but my mother kept an adolescent naivety right up until the end of her life.

I didn't [prod] my mother more about Aunt Willa's putative lesbianism, perhaps because as a son I never saw my mother as someone who would understand sexual attraction anyway.

Also, despite the fact Willa wrote so well about strong women, I thought she also wrote well about men and women. She just didn't write about them with a lot of sentimentality.

Others say she hardly wrote about sex at all. But there was a lot of sensual and even erotic writing in O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

My mother's attitude towards homosexuality was complex. She had met the artists Frank Ingerson and George Dennison in Paris at the same dinner table and about the same time in Paris as she met Willa. Frank and George later lived at Cathedral Oaks in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.

She left me with Frank and George for a couple of days on more than one occasion -- days which I loved. Cathedral Oaks (later to become part of Yehudi's Alma estate) was a grand woodsy place in a grove of tall trees. I knew Frank and George were a "married" couple, but I was never told to be afraid of them -- and I wasn't and, as it turned out, had no reason to be.

On the other hand, part of the reason my mother came to resent and diminish the importance of the great author Thomas Mann was because of his trumpeting of homosexuality as a superior lifestyle. She did not feel it necessarily was.

"It was a belittling of the bourgeoisie, people who have children," she said.

She did not seem to put Willa's relationship with Edith Lewis in the same category as that of Frank and George. And if she did, it struck her as simply part of the natural order of things.

It's not that my mother was a prude. Later in life, when I was in my early teens, I developed a friendship with a girl that had begun when we were both in elementary school. We used to go into a shed behind my parent's garage and take our clothes off, and then not do much more because we didn't know what else we were supposed to be doing.

My mother knew something was going on, but she didn't stop us. As a youngster, she had been raised with no knowledge of sex, and perhaps she didn't want me to grow up that way.

For her, Willa's sexuality never was a matter of any concern.

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LIONEL ROLFE is the author of The Uncommon Fellowship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather now available in major bookstores throughout the United States and online. His books include Literary L.A. and The Fat Man on the Left. He is a frequent contributor to The World's Magazine.