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In 1931 the University of California awarded an honorary degree to
lesbian novelist Willa Cather during Charter Day ceremonies held at the
Greek Theatre. In his introductory remarks University President Robert
Gordon Sproul praised Cather as a “self-controlled and elevated
delineator of life on the western plains and in the Spanish southwest,
who at a time when literature is prevailingly matter-of-fact has not
lost sight of idealism and nobility; [a] writer of novels which are
beautiful and true, and not merely enlargements on back door gossip,
police reports, and treatises on psychiatry, [a] creative artist.”
It was common for elite visitors to Berkeley to be welcomed as the
guests of President and Mrs. Sproul at University House on campus.
Years after Cather’s visit, Marion Sproul Goodin remembered the rich and
famous who passed through her parent’s home:
Athletics, however avidly followed, were not the only excitement
of our life on campus; there was the constant parade of house guests:
the Charter Day speakers and other prominent visitors to Berkeley;
princes and princesses, presidents and prime ministers, sultans and
shahs. We children were not included in the great state occasions.
Nonetheless, we were living in the same house and did encounter each at
more unbuttoned moments. We often ate breakfast together. The library
at tea time in late afternoon was a common ground. And finally, added
to what we could ourselves observe, there was the added fillip of the
backstage gossip of the maids. Thus we learned that Willa Cather was
exceedingly shy and very precise in her requirements. She requested
breakfast in her room and did not appear at tea time in the library.
Her tea was taken very late in the evening, in her room, and she gave
the maid exact instructions as to the making up of her bed.... These
contacts, however fleeting, opened up to us the world beyond Berkeley
and gave us a sense of what sort of men and women moved on
that larger stage.
Cather’s lesbianism was not widely known, and it is possible —
perhaps likely — that President Sproul knew nothing at all about her
personal life. Certainly his introductory remarks reveal a conservative
taste in modern literature. There were no such official accolades for
Gertrude Stein when she visited the campus only four years
later. Stein’s visit, however, sparked much more interest among faculty
and students than did Cather’s. By 1931 Willa Cather was viewed by the
campus literary avant-garde as old-fashioned and stylistically
conservative.
Links on This Page
Read More About It
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Daily Californian, 24 March 1931
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There was Light: Autobiography of a University: a Collection of
Essays by Alumni of the University of California, Berkeley,
1868-1996, edited by Jean Stone (Berkeley : University of
California, 1996)
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