The Song of the Lark

"I had a really lovely encounter with this book when I first read it at 21–22 years old. I was studying Willa Cather in college and I picked this book up and just fell in love, hard. I read it again just recently and it was one of those really wonderful experiences when the book is even better the second time around. In a lot of ways, The Song of the Lark is a kind of prototype for my own book, and it’s mostly because of Thea. Thea is such a striking character. She’s wildly talented – her teachers pinpoint that she has this ‘voice that comes from nature’ and she has this amazing aptitude for music and for voice. But the story really spins on her crazy sense of will. Yes, she’s very much a General. Even when she’s very young she feels passionately about her music, she feels a drive and she practises and studies very closely. And even when she’s young, she feels disdain for mediocrity. Quite markedly early in the story, she feels disdain for other girls around her who are her same age but who receive accolades and praise for being pretty and doing a song and dance. There’s that scene when she’s about 11 or 12 and her great rival in town is Lily, a girl who can do the whole little song-and-dance thing. And it’s the first time we really get to see Thea be furious – she’s absolutely furious when Lily has the central song at the show in Moonstone. I really love that turn because we can trace that steeliness in Thea right the way through the novel. Cather doesn’t make any bones about the kind of hardening that can often come from very hard work and from striving for perfection and not leaving any room for human error in your life and art. Thea is forever pressing forward in her practice, and I guess it’s true, that makes her, as a character, not that likeable. It’s one of her patrons early on in the novel who points out that she’s very much interested in herself – as she should be . Which is an interesting and fitting observation. That’s part of what drew me in on the first reading – I was so bowled over by that steeliness and that hardening – but, on revisiting the book, I realised that I hadn’t noticed as closely the passages that sort of outline the fact that, as she grows older, Thea loses her sense of joy. There’s a sense of flight in her early practice, when she’s singing or playing the piano – she feels true joy. But the older she gets, the more that sense of joy – despite the fact that, in terms of her skill set, she has improved and become a master – vanishes; it’s in the past, it’s a memory. It’s not something that she’ll ever really reclaim and that’s the sad part. “Thea is forever pressing forward in her practice, and I guess it’s true, that makes her, as a character, not that likeable” Towards the end of the book, Doctor Archie, from Moonstone, comes to see Thea after she gives this performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She’s young and supposedly in her prime, but the description of her is that she looks like she’s 40. There are lines and rivets in her face; she looks spent. That’s a down note to the book which I didn’t pick up so much on first reading, but it gives the story so much more flesh. But there’s also the joy that you can only get from discovering something new – it can’t last or be repeated again and again. The experience has to be new every time. If you were forever in that same moment of rapture, you’d be in a state of stasis. There would be no progress, and progress is something that Thea is hell-bent on. It’s part of what makes her so good, and so accomplished. So, it’s a loss, sure, but I think it’s a necessary one."