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What the Movie Didn't Tell You
By Dan Sanders
Perhaps the greatest value of a film like The Song of the Lark
is that it urges many people to read the novel that inspired it. A book read after the film has been seen has a special allure, like juicy family secrets learned years later. In even the most skilled film
adaptation, the characters are formed only to a skeletal extent compared to what the novelist has time to develop. It is up to the director, designers, technicians and actors to finish the job and do the book
justice. From the very beginning of Cather's work, there are rich details that the script must, regrettably, omit. This production of the novel is particularly interesting because the entire final portion of
the book—depicting Thea as a famous opera singer—is excised from the film. So just what wasn't the movie able to tell you? At the novel's opening, only fate saves Thea from a child's grave. Doctor Archie is at
the Kronborg's house on other business—the birth of Thea's younger brother, Thor. Archie finds Thea ignored in a freezing room, suffering from pneumonia, and he barely saves her life. Within a few hundred
words, Cather makes bluntly plain the deprivations of frontier living. A few years later, Ray Kennedy's death is far less an accident than an act of manslaughter by Joe Giddy, his shiftless co-worker on the
railroad. Giddy is jealous of Ray, a little afraid of him, resents him the way a lesser man resents a better one. One of Giddy's duties is to put warning lights behind the caboose to warn any approaching
engines, but in a moment of petty defiance he shirks this duty, and it is this witless treachery that kills Ray. All of us learn the hard way that life is short, but only the Thea Kronborgs of the world never
forget it. The following year, on her train journey home from Chicago, Thea encounters a cowering, tubercular girl. While they barely trade a dozen words, the encounter changes Thea's life. Cather tells us
of Thea, "She smiled—though she was ashamed of it—with the natural contempt of strength for weakness," but she then buys the girl, anonymously, a rose and coffee. It is not enough to be just principled or just
strong. To succeed as a singer, Thea realizes she will have to be both. The world is brutal, and some people simply don't make it; to avoid being one of them, Thea must cultivate both determination and a
sense of purpose: "She was going to have a few things before she died. She realized that there were a great many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent that night, and that they all
contained young people who meant to have things. But the difference was that she was going to get them! That was all. Let people try to stop her!" Growing Up Once life's grand lessons
are learned, Thea can face the tribulations of adulthood—achieving success, settling her life, deciding whether to marry. Neither man who has fallen for her is free to make a life with her. In the novel, Fred
Ottenburg's proclivity for deceit runs much deeper than hiding his marriage from Thea. In Cather's recounting of his past, he met his wife when she came to New York to buy clothes for a wedding—her wedding to a
friend of Fred's. She was "witty and slangy; said daring things and carried them off with nonchalance." Though she was blithely "scornful of everything," Fred became stubbornly addicted to her; it was
quickly plain that the marriage was a disastrous one, but she now refuses to divorce him. Less worldly than Ottenburg and unhappily married as well, Doctor Archie faces long odds in winning Thea, but he is wise enough
to accept this gracefully. Archie's devotion to Thea is such that he unblinkingly borrows money from someone else so he may, in turn, loan it to her. The doctor's goodness is so infectious that even Captain
Harris, a silver-mining hustler with whom Archie has invested, won't cheat him out of his piece of a mine he knows is about to hit big. Harris actually loans Archie the money needed to send Thea to Germany so she
can study. With a series of episodes like this, Cather drives home a maddening truth: the random nature of artistic success. Yes, Thea works and earns it, but like many artists who "make it" without
money or connections, she is also graced with an amazing run of luck: Archie's saving her life as a child, then giving her books; Wunsch's manic drive; Spanish Johnny's passion; Kennedy's sad little legacy, which
finances her escape from Moonstone; the selflessness of Harsanyi, who gallantly passes her on to a more qualified teacher; and Ottenburg, who is wise enough to see the need for Thea to recuperate in Arizona and rich
enough to make it possible. Thea's path is cleared by an unlikely string of disparate, courtly men, men who simply see something in her. Cather is content to marvel at such mysteries instead of claiming the
answers to them, a humility that comprises one of her great strengths as a novelist: "She remembered the way Ray had looked at her that morning. Why had he cared so much? And Wunsch, and Doctor Archie,
and Spanish Johnny, why had they?" Once Thea is safely aboard the ship to Germany, it is the end of the narrative that Willa Cather never regretted writing. What followed, she later wished she had not put in the
book. The film script follows suit, ending at this point as well. Only in the book can one learn just what happened to Thea Kronborg. Part VI—Kronborg The script ignores the last 75 pages of the
book, and it is probable that Cather would have liked it that way. Commenting on The Song of the Lark
two decades after its publication, she is rueful about the book's final chapters, claiming that once Thea had found her artistry, the worthwhile story had been told; the entire sequence relating her life as an opera diva was superfluous. Cather dismissed Part VI as a 'descending curve,' declaring: "Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful." This assessment, however, ignores the deep human fascination with fame. Whole publications and television channels, of course, are devoted to tracking who gains and loses it. The spectacle of what public life does to a Jimi Hendrix, River Phoenix, or Dennis Rodman often eclipses the very deeds that make them famous. In truth, the final pages of
The Song of the Lark offer a remarkable portrait of an artist at the absolute peak of her powers, but one also aware those powers might blow away with the next wind. Cather, also, bravely creates a novel
around a powerful woman calling the shots in an era where women are considered too weak to even vote. Finally, she incisively conveys The Price—the hard fact that performing artists live their lives as public
property, particularly if they are female. All this is completely worthwhile reading, and it satisfies the curiosity an exemplary novel provokes; if a reader is asked to watch a character struggle for success for
hundreds of pages, it's only natural for that reader to want to see the payoff. Plainly, in damning Part VI, Cather was a bit too hard on herself. Even if she failed by her commendable standards, is still
deeply compelling literature. What didn't Cather think the reader needed to know? The events of a decade and a half, encompassing a career that will depict Thea's metamorphosis into a star so big she needs only
one name, Kronborg. As Part VI opens, it is ten years after her departure for Germany. Doctor Archie and Fred Ottenburg meet as old friends, and as they catch up on past events so do we. Archie hit it rich
from the mine he came within an inch of selling, and he is now the most powerful man in Colorado. His cringing, miserly wife died stupidly some years ago. Fred is still imprisoned by his catastrophic
marriage. Both men still love Thea, though neither has seen Thea much in recent years. When Archie decides to go to New York and witness her second season as an emerging opera star there, Ottenburg follows
him. What this sojourn becomes, really, is a great final race for her hand, played with touching, Round Table cordiality by the two rivals. Then to New York, and Thea. Everything in her world has changed,
as it does between any woman's twentieth and thirtieth years. Both her parents are dead. Her big break in Europe came just as Mrs. Kronborg was dying and Thea could not so much as come home to say
good-bye. The years have hardened Thea (she even refers to an insolent hotel worker as a "nigger"), and made her temperamental, a prima donna in every sense of the phrase. She wears the hard veneer of the
self-made artist, and it is out of absolute necessity. If she fails at her work, she does so before thousands, and the resulting press will be savage. Like a high-wire acrobat, she must always remember that
much of the audience is there to see her fail. It is a disciplined, solitary life. When Doctor Archie arrives in Manhattan, his first encounter with Thea jars him. He feels as if he barely knows her
now. Her singing pleases him, but he is ignorant of the emotional toll that performing takes on an artist, and she seems worn and aged to Archie at first. "Your work becomes your personal life," she explains
to him. "It's like being woven into a big web." He sees Thea again a few nights later, and she is rested and looks much better. Out of nowhere, however, the really Big Break strikes: a more
famous singer has taken ill, and Thea is asked to take over for her at intermission. It's the operatic equivalent of being summoned from the bullpen to pitch in the World Series. Archie and Ottenburg, loyal
as ever, help her get to the theater on a few minutes' notice. Thea is a rousing success that night, and it's plain from that point onward she's going to be a major star. She has, perhaps, five or six prime
years left, and can demand a top salary. Thea's last performance in The Song of the Lark
is before what could be called her life's audience. Most of the people she cares about who are still walking the earth are there: Doctor Archie, and Fred. So is Harsanyi, now a star in his own right. So, incredibly, is her treasured Spanish Johnny, now a musician for Barnum and Bailey. Johnny waits for her outside the theater with a throng of admirers. She glides by and misses his gaze. He does not call out to her. Johnny merely sees her for a moment, and that is enough. Only of poor Wunsch is there is no trace; he is gone forever. The reader looks for him to emerge outside the theater, on the street, on a train, anywhere, but it never happens. He has vanished, the way failed artists do.
The book ends where it began, in Moonstone, five years later and "nearly twenty years after Thea Kronborg left it for the last time," a scared country girl with her meager worldly funds pinned to her underwear.
No one from the town's earlier days remains there but Thea's sweet, scatterbrained aunt, Tillie, a character completely cut from the film; Thea, with her trademark soft spot towards the helpless, now supports her.
"Kronborg" has become one of the biggest names in opera. She is married at last to Fred Ottenberg, whose tortured wife finally died a couple of years earlier. Tillie all but lives for the newspaper mailed to
her from New York, with its accounts of her niece's triumphs. In the paper she opens this day is a report from London. Thea just performed in London for His Majesty. As a girl Thea was fascinated with
pretty stones and hunted for them in the hills outside Moonstone. And now there is the gift of a jewel from a king. The pinnacle is hers. This is just a handful of the novel's splendors, of course; there
are countless more. Freed by the film from having to concentrate on what is going to happen, a reader of The Song of the Lark
can then concentrate on why they happen. Ultimately, these shrewd exposés of human behavior—the whys and wherefores of our natures, something every great writer manages above all else—are the bedrock of their literary endeavor. Like gold that backs a paper currency, they give the book its true and ultimate value.
Dan Sanders is a writer living in Santa Monica, California. Extension Activities For a lesson plan that focuses on studying character development in part one of the novel, go to the Friends of Childhood lessonDiscussion
1. Twenty years after The Song of the Lark
was published, Willa Cather wrote that she regretted the final scenes in the novel, claiming that the most compelling story was Thea's struggle for success, not success itself. The screenwriter of "Lark" chose to follow this advice and not include these scenes in the film. Do you agree or disagree with Cather's assessment of "Part VI—Kronborg"?
2. What are some personal qualities and choices that lead to Wunsch's failure as an artist? 3. What are some personal qualities and choices that lead to Thea's success? Essay
1. If you had been hired to write the screenplay adaptation of The Song of the Lark, would you have included the "Part VI—Kronborg" section? Why or why not? 2. Late in the novel, Thea (now an opera star)
explains her loneliness and eccentricities to Doctor Archie by telling him, "Your work becomes your personal life . . . It's like being woven into a big web." What do you think she means by this? What do you
think Cather was saying about the demands on a performing artist? How have these demands posed difficulties for famous musicians you have read or heard about? Cite specific examples. 3. How much does luck
factor into an artist's success? Is it a greater or lesser factor than hard work? Cite examples from famous musicians, visual artists, or actors you are familiar with. Then contrast these with the
factor that luck plays in Thea's success. |
