THE INVITATION was probably passed on to her by S. S. McClure, the editor of McClure’s Magazine. It arrived some time in early November of 1905, and it would have seemed a sign that the literary world was beginning to take her seriously. Twenty-six years old, about to turn twenty-seven, she wasn’t that well-known at the time, though McClure had published her first collection of stories, The Troll Garden, earlier that year, and a collection of poems had been issued two years before. She was not then living in New York City—perhaps she wrote to the friend who later became her lifetime companion, Edith Lewis, to ask if she might stay with her. Maybe she thought, “How ridiculous,” or “What does one wear?” Maybe it pleased her that his birthday was just a few days before her own.
However it happened, Willa Cather did go to Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday party and stood in the receiving line for fifty privileged guests and waited to shake the great man’s hand. Photographs of Twain from the party showed his hair very white, eyes twinkling, eyebrows bushy, a wryness in the curve of his cheek near the mustache. He liked having his picture taken—when his wife had been alive he sent photographs of either or both of them to all their friends—and he posed many times that evening. Willa Cather would have been one of the younger people there. She loved beautiful clothes, and a little later, when she was established in New York, she sometimes wore very stylish dresses and extravagant hats, but that evening, still finding her way, she chose something simple and stood back when the photographer passed. Whatever encounter Cather and Twain had, it was limited to a joke, a handshake in the midst of many, an exchange of nods before a photograph was taken.
Glittering gowns and oysters are stiflers of sincerity, of the kinds of things that Cather could have said and that Twain might have liked to hear. Cather had read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn growing up, but that evening she would have seen right away that there would be no chance to tell Mark Twain why she had cared about them.
Twain and Cather had grown up in landscapes of similar breadth—the wide Mississippi and the Great Plains. They were both fiercely alive as children, out exploring, talking to neighbors, and building worlds of their own. And when they were home, they were reading and lying in bed in attic rooms at night, watching the moon through the window and dreaming of the world beyond—the England and France of the Knights of the Round Table, Joan of Arc, and the Three Musketeers. They grew up and went off and traveled, finding ways to New York and to Europe, going home for visits, never to stay. As they grew older, though, they turned in mind to Missouri and Nebraska and the children they had been, the children of Hannibal and Red Cloud, of the river and the locomotive and the open sky, and much of their best work had this at its heart.
•
Cather was seated with Edward Martin of the magazine Life and Frederick Duneka of the publisher Harper and Brothers. Cather already felt that her loyalty was to the relatively new McClure’s and to its bold creative spirit, S. S. McClure, who was publishing Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Thomas Hardy, and her own short stories. If her table companions asked about her own work, she could have told them she was writing a novel that she was wondering about abandoning and was teaching at a Pittsburgh high school, which she liked but found tiring. There were other things to talk about. They were eating fillet of kingfish, saddle of lamb, redhead duck, and Baltimore terrapin. They were drinking sauternes, champagne, and brandy.
The party was given at the Red Room of Delmonico’s Restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. Delmonico’s had been, for nearly fifty years, the restaurant for all great New York occasions; it was where people hosted dinners for the Prince of Wales. Twain’s party was organized by the editor of Harper’s Weekly, Colonel George Harvey. Harper’s later ran thirty-two pages of pictures and stories about the party as a special supplement to its Christmas edition. The Red Room had potted palms and gilt mirrors; the forty-piece orchestra from the Metropolitan Opera played for the enjoyment of 170 guests.
Twain loved parties like this. Ordinarily, he got so wrought up that he stayed awake into the morning hours writing letters describing the particulars to people who hadn’t been there. On the occasion of his own birthday, though, there were few friends to write to, for they were nearly all present—William Dean Howells, Henry Rogers, Andrew Carnegie—the friends of a lifetime.
•
Despite her pleasure in Huck Finn, to this point Willa Cather had had a distinctly critical attitude toward Mark Twain himself. She did not like showiness of any kind; she mistrusted it on two counts: it didn’t sit well with her relatively austere Nebraska upbringing, nor did it appeal to the quietly understated Boston literary society that she most aspired to join. Mark Twain was nothing if not showy—he was known for the slangy Missouri language he used in speeches and stories, his expensive house, and the fabulous wealth of his oil- and steel-baron friends. After the party, the guests took home foot-high plaster statues of Twain.
The first time Cather had ever written about Twain, she had been a student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she was a campus fixture and somewhat unconventional; she wore men’s suits, carefully tailored. Twain had written a very funny and pointed and critical review of the French writer Paul Bourget’s Outre-mer: Impressions of America, a book Cather admired. Cather had not yet been to Europe, had in fact rarely been out of Nebraska since she had arrived there at the age of nine. Europe and its authors remained for her the pinnacle of enlightened civilization and when Twain said he thought it was presumptuous of the visiting Frenchman to try to define the American character and that the job had better be left to the only qualified person, namely, “the native novelist,” preferably to a thousand different native novelists, she was incensed. In her own column in the university paper Cather wrote, with a sweetly youthful failure of judgment, that Twain’s piece was “scurrilous” and that Twain himself was “a blackguard.”
•
Cather was willing to concede that Twain knew something about his home territory; in another article for the same paper, she wrote: “He is much better when he writes about Missouri boys than when he makes sickly romances about Joan of Arc.” This was discerning; at the time, Twain’s sentimental novel Joan of Arc was widely admired. Twain used to tell the story, though it probably wasn’t true, that he had first encountered Joan of Arc in a kind of fated way when he was working as a printer’s apprentice and a page from a book about her literally blew across his desk: he had loved her and her crusade and triumph and heroic death ever since. When Twain had written of Joan, he had described a young woman who looked very like his daughter Susy. After Susy died, the pictures he had in his mind of Joan and Susy blurred ever closer together.
Seventeen years after the birthday party, Cather made her own use of Joan of Arc as the heroine of her character Claude Wheeler, in the novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, One of Ours. Cather had Wheeler die on the battlefields of France—many of her characters died young—with an idealism that her friends who actually saw the Great War from close by thought Cather had rather romanticized.
One of Ours was a Civil War novel set in the Great War, and Claude was the sort of hero Cather had imagined when she was a girl in Nebraska dressed up in her uncle’s Confederate uniform. After One of Ours, Cather wrote increasingly of older characters, of other cultures, and of history, and in this she was quite close to Twain. They were alike in the early, wide, glorious novels of home—the prairie novels and the river novels—and they were also alike in the darker later years. In maturity they returned to the openness of childhood and in age to its loneliness.
•
It mattered to Cather to have seen Twain. She watched him for a few hours, saw him talking to people and saw them laughing, perhaps heard a few good jokes and stories from people at her table who knew Twain. She saw the affection of his friends, especially of William Dean Howells, the great figure in the Boston literary world she so venerated, the publisher and old friend of her idol, Henry James, and the person who had given another writer Cather admired, Sarah Orne Jewett, her start. There were hours of toasts that night; Howells’s concluded, “I will not say, ‘Oh King, live forever,’ but ‘Oh King, live as long as you like!’”
Perhaps one of Cather’s dinner companions glanced over and saw her smiling a particular smile, one that suggested that, though she was present and enjoying herself, she was not quite of this clamoring world. Something in the way Cather held her shoulders and the way she observed a crowd gave people to know that she came from a place where the wind blew a little cleaner, and, even in a hot and crowded room, she carried some sense of its distant freshness.
•
Now at last it was time for Twain to make his own speech. Twain stood and began by saying that he had gotten to the age of seventy “in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life that would kill anybody else.” His rules had always been not to stay up after there was no one to sit up talking with, not to smoke more than one cigar at the same time, to drink only when other people were drinking, and to eat only things that didn’t agree with him, “until one or the other of us have got the best of it.” As for morals, he said he had owned many of them—the first he had bought “secondhand” and “a little worse for wear.” Though clearly still a man who went to every party, at the end of his speech he acknowledged a quieter impulse and said that at seventy you may find yourself shrinking “at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecoming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter through the deserted streets . . .” You may turn down invitations so that you don’t have to come back and remember that there’s no one to wake up in your empty house anymore:
If you shrink at thought of these things, you need only reply, “Your invitation honors me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.”
After the crowd had shared this quiet moment, and after the storm of applause had broken out as they cheered him again and again, the evening turned toward its conclusion. The guests began to gather their wraps, the carriages to line up outside the door. There was a great warmth of leave-taking, as there is among people who know they have witnessed something historic.
Twain was living then at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, and, though they had been a little less close since Twain was more often in the company of his wealthier friends, it could be that Howells went back with him and they sat and laughed at the memory of Twain insulting John Greenleaf Whittier at Whittier’s seventieth-birthday party. Twain might have said that if he hadn’t been such an idiotic young man he would have been a little kinder to the old gentleman. They would have stayed up as late as they could, thinking this might be one of the last great evenings they would share.
•
Cather later came to know that house on Fifth Avenue. The year after the birthday party, when she moved to Greenwich Village near where Twain lived, she used now and again to go and visit him in the company of a few other people. Twain liked her writing and admired her poem “The Palatine,” published in McClure’s Magazine, which he read out to his secretary. At that time, Twain received people in his bedroom; he lay in bed and smoked and told stories.
Twain used to sit, propped up on pillows, sheets tousled around him, cigar burning, the room smoky and a little dark, drawling along, telling river stories and stories of being in India with Kipling and of the day that he and William Dean Howells tried to walk to Concord and of the day that his servant George caught and stopped a runaway horse and carriage and of how Charles Webster had stolen his publishing business out from under him and of the speech he had given campaigning against Grant at the banquet of the Army of the Tennessee. The talk poured out of him, and Cather was equal to it. The depth of understanding in her dark blue eyes and knowing smile would have pleased him; he would have played to it, the stories especially good on the days she came. When she left, he fell back on the pillows, finished his cigar, and slept.
•
In an interview she gave in 1913, following the appearance of O Pioneers!, a question was put to Willa Cather. “‘My own favorite American writers?’ said Miss Cather. ‘Well, I’ve never changed in that respect much since I was a girl at school. There were great ones I liked best then and still like—Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sarah Orne Jewett.’” In 1925, when Cather wrote a preface to the works of Jewett, she said, “It is this very personal quality of perception, a vivid and intensely personal experience of life, which make a ‘style’; Mark Twain had it, at his best, and Hawthorne. But among fifty thousand books you will find very few writers who ever achieved a style at all.”
On the night of the birthday party, perhaps Cather began to see that she had underestimated Twain. “He has a style all his own,” she might have said to Edith Lewis that night when she got home, with her plaster statue under her arm, having taken a cab, feeling the extra expense justified by the lateness of the hour and the grandeur of the occasion.