AFTER THE PLEASURE OF spending the holidays at home in Red Cloud while being celebrated for the triumph of Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1928 started poorly for Cather. Her father, with whom she always had a tender relationship, died rather suddenly from heart problems. Her mother took temporary refuge in California with Cather’s second younger brother, Douglass, but while there suffered a debilitating stroke and had to be moved to a care facility. Nearing fifty-five, Cather was becoming part of the older generation. Her home at 5 Bank Street in New York had also been lost; she and Edith Lewis had moved into a hotel, the Grosvenor, intending only a brief stay there until more suitable arrangements could be found. But for the next five years Cather would have no permanent address aside from the Grosvenor, and most of her things stayed packed away in storage. She traveled constantly—to Nebraska, to California, to Canada, to France—to attend to family and professional matters. During this time of loss, however, she did have some solace. The cottage she shared with Lewis on Grand Manan Island was a refuge. More important, she continued to write. In 1928, while on their way to Grand Manan, she and Lewis stopped in Quebec City, and when Lewis fell ill Cather had unexpected time to wander around the old French settlement. What she saw stirred her, and she set to work on a new novel. Shadows on the Rock, concerned with the day-to-day life of a handful of citizens in 1697 Quebec, was published by Knopf in 1931 and became one of the top-selling books of the year.
February 10 [1928]
Red Cloud
Dear Alfred;
I have not written you, as I expected to be in New York at this date. My father has been very ill for the last two weeks, his second attack of angina, and that has kept me here. The things I want to discuss with you are hard to take up by letter.
The demand for the Archbishop seems a mixed blessing, as even now there seems to be no very adequate method of satisfying it. As I telegraphed you last night, the dealers here and in all the little towns about have been trying [to] get books from McClurg, Chicago, to fill the orders of a few patient friends who were not able to get the book for Christmas. Finally McClurg wrote the dealers here that they have ordered the books to be sent direct from the publisher to Grice & Grimes, Red Cloud. So far, they have not come. If all these little town dealers in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, who always order from McClurg, can’t get books, isn’t there something wrong with the method of distribution? They tell me all their orders for “Antonia” are filled quickly and without trouble.
I have been here nearly three months, and in all that time the book has not had a fair chance in this little town, or in this part of the state. I don’t know about Omaha, but it has been impossible to get the book in Lincoln part of the time. I’ve had so many complaints from Catholics all over the country that I’m afraid there has been the same difficulty in getting books, East and West.
When you decided not to give the “Archbishop” any individual advertising, then I understood that it was up to the book to sell itself if it could. But how can it sell itself if it is not printed, and if the jobbers don’t carry it? It was out of print for a week or ten days at the most critical part of the selling season. Only ten days, but they were the ten days before Christmas. However, that’s over. The point I raise is, why is it still so hard to get books?
I shall start east in a week or ten days, as soon as I feel that it’s quite safe to leave my father. I’m your personal friend and admirer, now and always, but I don’t think you’ve given the Archbishop a flattering share of your interest and attention. With any personal enthusiasm behind it, I feel sure the book would have done much better. But we can talk of these things much better than we can write of them. I write a devilish hand at best and I’ve been under a considerable strain since father fell ill.
Faithfully
The Knopf offices, upon getting this letter, responded quickly with a promise to investigate. Internally, they suspected that Cather was exaggerating the problem.
In February, Cather returned to New York, since her father seemed to be recovering. On March 3, however, Charles F. Cather had a heart attack and died. She immediately took a train back to Nebraska, arriving very early in the morning the day after his death.
April 3 [1928]
Red Cloud
My Dearest Dorothy:
My father died on March 3d, just seven days after I had left home for New York. He was ill only a few hours—angina. He was happy and gay to the very end. I’d like to show you his picture sometime, he kept such an extraordinarily youthful color and young eyes and figure. He was very handsome, in a boyish Southern way. I have lost people I loved terribly, young people, but this is the first death there has ever been in our family—never a child or grandchild. I did not know death could be so beautiful. I got home to him a little after five, just as the dawn was breaking over him. He lay on a little stretcher in the big bay window of his own room, in one of his long silk shirts, and all the rest of the tired family were asleep. He looked so happy, so contented, so at home—his smooth fair face shaved—everything as it always was. He was such a sweet southern boy and he never hurt anybody’s feelings, not even in death.
Think of it, my dear, this winter of all winters, I had here with them, simply because I felt we could never be so happy again. I stayed because they were both so well, not because they were ailing. Having had those three months as by a miracle, I’ll stand a good deal of punishment at the hands of fate.
Dear, I never knew any Preston in Pittsburgh. I knew a Preston Cooke Farrar but no Preston.
Mother went to California with my bachelor brother two weeks ago. I’ve been staying on alone to have a lot of papering and repairing done. Such a nice wise, kind Bohemian paper-hanger to do everything. And just silence in the old house and in father’s room has done so much for me. I feel so rested and strong it is as if father himself had restored my soul.
I suppose after Easter I must go back to the world—but not for long.
Lovingly
Willa
Though Cather and her parents had been lifelong Baptists, they were confirmed as Episcopalian in 1922. Charles Cather’s memorial service was held in Red Cloud’s Grace Episcopal Church.
Monday after Easter [April 9, 1928]
Red Cloud
My Dearest Mother;
After two weeks of spring we had a bitter cold Easter. Elsie and I decorated the altar in memory of father. The church was nearly full of people. After the service I gave one of the Easter Lily plants to Molly [Ferris], and one to Hazel Powell, and the daffodils I took down to father’s grave—you know he loved the “Easter flowers” as we used to call them, and they are the very first flowers I can remember in Virginia.
I had dinner with Will [Auld] and Charles [Auld] at the hotel. Later I made a call on Mrs. [Alta] Turmore and Clifford—she had asked me to dinner, but I could not go. Then I went over to Molly’s and had a delicious little supper with her. It was lucky Elsie did not try to come down, as the weather turned so bitter.
Isn’t it funny for me to be getting a card from the Peggs? When that bashful blond boy in the butcher shop lost his wife and baby I went down to Carolina and ordered a lot of those beautiful snapdragons such as were sent to father. Everyone felt so sorry. She had a tumor inside her which grew along with the baby and strangled it. A proper examination and operation would have saved her. She had been carrying a dead baby for several days. Dr. [James W.] Stockman only called [Dr. E. A.] Creighton when she was dying. Poor Albert walks about like a dead man.
Lizzie [Huffmann] has been at the Macs [McNenys’] for a week now, but she still dashes in in the morning to make the kitchen fire for me, and I dine over there occasionally. Helen [McNeny] is home sick with grippe.
I’ve got such lovely silk curtains up in the big dining room. My little old bed is painted primrose color like the washstand,—I mean the wooden bed that was in the west room. And the table in [the] downstairs back hall, which proved to be not walnut at all, I had mended and painted and it’s very pretty.
Molly had dinner with me here on Good Friday and Saturday nights, and says I’m a good cook. She helped me wash the dishes.
I had all father’s oak furniture gone over with furniture polish for you and it looks so much better. If ever you want it painted I’ll have it done.
Please write to me, dear mother.
With much love,
Willie
April 11 [1928]
Dear Roscoe;
Yes, indeed, I’ve been staying on in the old house and finding it such a comfort. I’ve had all the downstairs re-papered, except the parlor—thought mother might like one room just the same. They had to scrape off four layers of paper so it was a mess for days. Then I had father’s room papered in a lovely gray English chintz paper for mother. I’ve had the yard cleaned and new shrubs set out, and lovely drapery curtains put up in the front dining room. The back dining room really looks lovely. Ondrals, the nice old Bohemian painter will do the bath room over after I go. We had to do a good deal of plastering, as most of the sitting room ceiling fell down. These messy repairs could never have been made with mother here—it would have fretted her to death. I’m awfully pleased with the results, and I’ve seldom spent money that I’ve enjoyed so much.
Your draft I’ve registered in the one account book I carry about with me—a complete list of checks received,—and I’ll credit it on your note when I reach New York. I’ll stay on here a few days, then go to the Mayo’s for awhile, and on to New York. Edith’s poor mother is still dying—it is surely a long, hard way.
My love to you, dear brother and to all the ladies of your house. They are all grown up now!
Yours,
Willie
Sunday [April 1928?]
The Kahler Hotel, Rochester, Minnesota
My Dearest Mother;
I got here this morning, and will register at the clinic in the morning. This hotel has been made over and is now better than the Zumbro.
I spent about four hours with Elsie in Lincoln, and we had a long talk about you and your future. We are agreed that whenever you want to go home one of us will be there with you and we will do everything we can to make you happy there. We will put our whole heart into it. Elsie can get a year’s leave of absence next winter, she says. If she can’t, I will be there, I promise you.
I bought a sprinkler for the lawn at last, and before I left Mac [Bernard McNeny] and I were rivals in getting the grass green. The new shrubs Will and Amos set out are coming on well. I am paying Amos five dollars a month regularly to water and cut the lawn, and May 1st he and Floyd Turner [?] will set out big red zenias in the bare patch where father used to have various little flowers. I chose zenias because they are so hardy and will make their way alone.
There will be nothing desolate inside or outside the house if you want to come back to it, and everyone wants you to come. Elsie’s school is out the first day of June, so if you want to come back with Will Auld the first of June, Elsie can meet you there. The last word Lizzie said to me was, “Oh just let me know a few days before your mother comes, and I’ll make the house look like a palace for her.” You have your own house—the Bishop [George Allen Beecher] and Mrs. [Florence George] Beecher think it a very attractive one, and I’ll make it more and more so. And you have your own friends, and they miss you terribly and you will enjoy them more than you ever did before. Indeed, I love them so much for their loyalty to you that I feel I can never keep away from Red Cloud long again. That’s true!
So don’t be blue, Mother. You seem to me almost the most fortunate old person I know. You have Doug to travel with, and several of us to hang about you when you want to be at home. Of course if Elsie is with you next winter you will keep Lizzie, and I think we ought to pay Elsie, too.
Now cheer up; you are getting older, and that’s hard luck—but your children and all our old, faithful friends, and the young friends, too, are determined to make you happy.
With a heart very full of love for you
Willie
Characteristically, she fended off attempted inroads on her time, including a suggestion by Ferris Greenslet in late April that she write a biography of the poet Amy Lowell.
May 9, 1928
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Mrs. Austin:
I wish the suggestion made by Mr. Greenslet and Dr. [Henry Goddard] Leach had come a year ago, when I had a good deal more time and energy than I have now. Just because I never write biographical or critical studies, editors bother me to death trying to make me do them. They simply want them because I resist their persuasions. Greenslet has just been trying to crowd on me a biography of Amy Lowell—I would be as likely to undertake a history of the Chinese Empire! I wouldn’t do it for the whole amount of the Lowell Estate,—simply because that sort of writing is an agony to me. I need very little money, and my life and liberty are very precious to me.
One of the pleasures of having an absolute rule is that once or twice in a lifetime one may break it, and if things were at all well with me, I would be tempted to break it on your account! [B]ut this has been a very bad winter for me, and I’m not going to do any writing at all for at least six months. My father died in March, and I have just come back to New York after several weeks at the Mayo Clinic. This is the first time in my life that I have ever felt absolutely tired, through and through, and I am simply going to rest for a while. I don’t know where yet, but I may go on to my mother, who is in California with my brother. For this year, my family concerns, father’s death and mother’s consequent breakdown have simply wiped out everything else. I know you will understand that I speak to you with a frank and open heart. Sometimes the difficulties of life are just too much for one, and then it is best to keep away from the desk.
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
In early June, after weeks battling influenza, Cather received an honorary degree at Columbia University.
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
June 7 [1928]
New York City
My Darling Mother;
No, no, no, I’m not cross! But I’m still very wobbly from that influenza, and people have been unusually merciless in pursuit of me. I am not accepting any invitations, but even writing notes of polite refusal becomes a heavy task.
The Commencement at Columbia was really quite thrilling and splendid; I wish some of you could have seen it. I was the only woman among the seven recipients of honorary degrees, the rest were all old men, as you will see by their pictures. I sat between the French Ambassador [Paul Claudel] and the President of the University of California [William Wallace Campbell]. We were all in caps and gowns, of course. I really got a great deal more applause than any one else; Edith was there and she says the roar for me lasted twice as long. I rose when my name was called, walked up to the President [Nicholas Murray Butler] and stood there until the applause was over; then he made a speech at me and gave me a diploma, two Deans of the University put a gorgeous collar about my neck and fastened it on my shoulders, and conducted me back to my seat on the platform. The other six were applauded only after the degree was bestowed, but I was applauded like a ball game, both before and after.
The great old Cuban patriot, [Antonio Sánchez] du Bustamante [y Sirvén], seemed to be second in popularity, and he is a wonder. I was never so patted and embraced by so many old men at once.
After the exercise I went straight to the President’s supper party, not a dinner, as no one had time to put on evening clothes. I had to meet and talk to all the Trustees and their wives, and the Professors and their wives, and a lot of Cubans and Spaniards and attachées of the French embassy and their wives. They are many of them wonderful people, and it’s all very delightful, and exciting,–––and exhausting. I was a tired creature when I came home in President Butler’s car. If I’d realized it would be such [a] spectacular affair, I’d have sent for Mary Virginia to come down.
I am sending the silk-and-velvet collar of Columbia and the one I got at Michigan, home to Carrie Sherwood to keep for me. They are very large, I’ve no room for them now, and she has made a special place in her spare room to keep such things for me. You can see them, if you wish, when you go home.
I hope and pray you will like your beads, and do not say they are too young, for they are not. Everybody trusts my taste but my family!
In a few days I will send you some envelopes addressed to Grand Manan, where I think we shall go from here. All mail sent to this hotel will be forwarded, however.
With a heart-ful of love to you.
Willie
TO COLONEL BUTLER
June 14, 1928
New York City
My dear Colonel Butler:
I have to admit that I am a woman, and I must also admit that I can make no reasonable explanation of my name. I was born in Virginia, however, and in those southern states it used to be, and still is, very common for a girl to be given the first name of one of her male relatives; sometimes the parents tried feebly to give the name a feminine ending, as in my own case. If I had to be William, I would have preferred to be William without modification. This is a rather long explanation, but you seemed really curious on this point.
Thank you for your appreciative words about the book. It follows very closely the real story of the first Archbishop of Santa Fé and his vicar, and the scene, of course, is laid in a country that I know very well.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
October 13, 1928
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Prof. Goodman:
One of my friends who did hear your radio talk tells me that she liked it very much, but that she was a good deal distressed at hearing my name mispronounced throughout. My name should be pronounced so as to exactly rhyme with “gather” and “rather”. I think the name “Kayther” about the ugliest on earth, and I do consider it a hardship that people so often attach it to me. My friend Mr. Mather’s name is always pronounced correctly. Nobody ever thinks of calling him Mayther.
I hope you will pardon my calling your attention to this, but next to being called dishonest, I think I would rather be called anything than Kayther!
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
It was in June, on their way to Grand Manan, that Cather and Lewis first visited Quebec City. Lewis writes in her memoir that when Cather saw the city, she was struck by “the sense of its extraordinarily French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent.” In November, Cather went back to Quebec, this time alone. She was at work on Shadows on the Rock. During this same period she also wrote “Double Birthday,” a short story set in Pittsburgh. Fritz Westermann, mentioned below, was a friend from Cather’s university days and a nephew of Julius Tyndale.
Tuesday [November or December 1928]
Dear Elsie:
Just back from Quebec. I long-distanced M.V. [Mary Virginia] last night to find when her father would be here, and invited the Auld family to dine with me Sunday night.
I enclose letter from Fritz Westermann. You see I took no chances this time! The story “Double-Birthday” has a sketch of Dr. Tyndale in it, so I simply sent it to Fritz and asked him whether I should publish it or not—told him I wouldn’t think of doing it if it would annoy him or the Doctor.
It will be out in the February Forum [then written out more clearly:] (Forum). Dr. Leach says it is the best short story he ever published, but it’s really not much. I can’t work without a house to work in, and I can’t work where I hate my surroundings. I’ve always felt in my bones that Long Beach [California] would be just as you say it is. One has only to reason it out from the people who go there!
With love to you
W.
I think Fritz is real nice and un-grudging, don’t you?
Dr. Tyndale wrote Cather a note saying he was flattered to find any of his characteristics in one of her stories.
December 5, 1928
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Mr. Barr:
I get, of course, a great many invitations to lecture, but very few of them are as tempting as the one you wrote some weeks ago when I was in Quebec. All my letters were held for me here, as I went away to escape from interruptions. My answer, therefore, is very tardy, and I apologize.
I always feel very deeply that I am a Virginian. My mother and father, though they went West long ago, were always Winchester people—not Nebraskans. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to talk for an hour or so to your students, and I hope that at some future time you will renew this invitation when I can accept it. This winter I can not make any engagements of that nature. The last year has been very much broken up, and I have got behind in my work and my life. My father died last spring, and since then my mother’s health has been uncertain. She is now in California with my brother, but I may have to go to her at any time. I always find lecturing tiring, and indulge in it but seldom. At some more fortunate time, however, I assure you I would like to go to Charlottesville and spend an hour with your young men [at the University of Virginia].
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Early in 1929, Cather broke away from her work on Shadows on the Rock to go to her mother in California.
TO GEORGE AND HARRIET FOX WHICHER
New Year’s Day [January 1, 1929]
New York City
Dear Friends:
I meant to go up to the Lord Jeffrey to work for a few weeks soon after the Holidays. But now my mother has had a stroke in California, where she is staying with my bachelor brother [Douglass]. I shall have to go out there now in a few weeks and give up working altogether for the present. I’d made a pleasant start and hate to leave it. If only mother were in San Francisco! But Long Beach, near Los Angeles, is the most hideous and vulgar place in the whole world. Well, this last year was a bad one, and this doesn’t promise much better. But only a part of last year was bad—all the winter in Red Cloud, where your fruit cake found me, was lovely, lovely,—like a winter flower garden, opening more and more–––It was the sort of thing one has to pay for, and pay dear. I suppose I mustn’t squirm now.
Virginia and Tom [Auld] gave me good word of you all at Thanksgiving time, and I send you all the good wishes in the world for 1929. I got a shopful of handkerchiefs last week, and have given them all away but yours and two others—the only one’s I liked. I’m fussy about handkerchiefs.
With love to you all.
Willa Cather
[Probably April or May 1929]
Long Beach, California
My Dear Dorothy:
About Christmas time mother had a stroke here where she was spending the winter with my bachelor brother. At that time I was ill with bronchitis in the Grosvenor hotel, New York and could not come. I got away in February and have been here ever since, first hunting a little home with a porch and yard to move mother to, then moving her, then spending days and days shopping for hardware, linen, furniture, dishes, mattresses—everything a home requires. Mother is completely paralyzed on the right side, and speechless. Yet behind the wrenched machinery her mind and strong will, her whole personality is just the same. She can moan[?] some times—oh so seldom!—we can understand. My sister Elsie has been here from the first. We have excellent nurses, thank God, but a tall, strong woman paralyzed is the most helpless thing in the world. She has to be fed with a spoon like a baby. Constant changes of position give her the only ease she can have. My brother carries her from bed to bed to rest her, and takes her out on the porch in a wheel chair for a couple of hours. Your letter came while I was rubbing her yesterday. I read part of it to her and she remembered you perfectly, and the time she met you at the door. She made me understand that she had seen you much oftener than that once.
This is the most horrible, unreal place in the world, on a dreary curve of the coast, I have rheumatism dreadfully here, and never felt so down-and-out anywhere. My mail is a horror—all the greedy, grasping, intrusive people who want things from writers have never been so merciless. I live at a hotel and taxi-cab out to see mother in the afternoon at the above address. The mornings I spend shopping—the thing that was always the hardest of all things for me to do. Elsie stays at the house to regulate the nurses and the servant.
Oh if only this dreadful thing had happened at home, in a human land, where mother would have had her lovely grandchildren to watch and work[?], where there were dear old friends, kind neighbors, memories, God. There is no God in California, no real life. Hollywood is the flower of all the flowers, the complete expression of it.
I stayed at home two months last spring, after mother came to California, having the old home made more comfortable for her—worked awfully hard, took as much out of me as a book—now she will never see it. Well, there is nothing to write, nothing to say or do, my dear, except to stand until one breaks, and the quicker that happens the better, if only one can break clear in two, and not just half-way. This is why I’ve not written, because I’ve lost my bearings and can’t write except as bitterly and desperately as I feel. Father’s death was swift and gay—he was laughing two hours before he died. Goodbye, God bless you, and don’t remember this letter after you read it. There are enough people crushed under this poor sick woman who defied time so long. Goodbye, dear—nothing to say.
Willa
By late May, the family had moved Virginia Cather to Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena, California.
[June 1929]
Dear Brother;
I am on my way East—will be at the Grosvenor Hotel 35 Fifth Ave. for the next ten days, then go to New Haven, at Hotel Taft. On June 19 I receive a doctorate degree from Yale—the second they have ever given a woman writer. The first was given to Mrs. Wharton eight years ago. She came over from Paris and stayed in New York one week to take it.
I hope you can skip out to see mother for a week this summer, and soon. Better come alone—its bad for her to have several about, she tries even in her feeble state to arrange, direct. I went North when Will Auld was here. Better come now than to her funeral—she will know you now and her mind is still unclouded, though often tired. She is losing ground a little all the time: now up, now down, but on the whole a good deal weaker and lower than when I first came three months ago. She tries, poor dear, but the odds are so terribly against her that I hope it won’t be very long, for her sake. Will Auld felt the same way. She is still herself, and can understand what you say to her. The trip would not be a very long one for you if you came by train. I had a round-trip ticket over this road, or I would have gone back by way of Rawlins. The Sanitarium is a really beautiful place—you could have quiet hours there alone with mother, the nurse in the other room within call. She may live like this a long while—several years, but is almost sure to deteriorate mentally and be less herself. It’s a cruel and pitiful thing, but you’ll be glad to have seen her, as I am. I’m wondering whether I will ever feel much enthusiasm for things again, though. I guess I will—for young people,—and young Art.
I had lovely visits with Jim Yeiser and Marguerite [Richardson] in San Francisco.
Willa
In the fall of 1929, Knopf was preparing to release a special edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop with illustrations by Harold Von Schmidt. Though Cather at first balked at the idea of an illustrated version, she was so pleased with the results that she later asked Knopf if they could print the illustrated version exclusively.
On the outside of the following letter was written:
Dear Miss [Manley] Aaron:
Please get all this to Mr. Stimson, as I have telegraphed him about it.
W.S.C.
TO GEORGE L. STIMSON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
October 17, 1929
Dear Mr. Stimson;
You are a violinist, put the mute on the biography—no the extinguisher! Anything more deadly dull than this jacket text, I can’t imagine. It’s all too foolish, and I really don’t think it’s up to the office to hand out these dull facts. They tell absolutely nothing about the book, or about me, nothing that the public wants to know.
Now, I want you to let me decide on this jacket text. Tell the public something they do want [to] know, something they write me letters about until my hand is fairly crippled with answering them; tell them something about how and why the book was written! That is what they want to know. Instead of this wooden stuff about my grandfathers and Von Schmidt’s (who in thunder cares about our grandfathers?) use this condensation I enclose of my letter to the Commonweal about the book. The English publisher had that letter printed in pamphlet form and gave it wide circulation—wrote me it was singularly effective as advertising. I have cut the article to just about the number of words in the two dreary sketches of Von Schmidt and me now on the jacket.
Please telegraph me that you will use the copy I’m sending you, and not that which is now in the proof of the jacket; and please write me the name of the person who wrote the copy, as I want to talk with her—or him—when I get back to town.
Now as to the copy I send you—very ragged, but I’m lucky to have even that with me.
1. Use quotes before every paragraph
2. When the long cuts occur, please end the paragraphs with asterisks.
3. Please read the proofs yourself and telephone me if you’re in doubt about anything.
Hastily, to catch the mail,
Yours
Willa Cather
Please note the change in the newspaper comment quoted. I beg you to use this one from the New Republic instead of that from the Baltimore Sun.
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
October 17 [1929]
My Dear Blanche;
Unless there is some very important reason why you must see me before you sail, I would like to stay up here about three weeks longer. This poor book has been jumped about so much—all it needs is sitting still. It’s going along smoothly now, and I don’t want to interrupt it just at this point. The working conditions are good, the country lovely, I am out of doors a great deal and feel awfully well—sprint up the mountain with a crowd of boys and don’t get used up. When I go back to New York I shall probably have bronchitis at once! Besides I can’t get my old quiet room at the Grosvenor for several weeks. So I really think I better stay on here for the present. When you come back I hope to be pretty well on my way with this book. It’s no world-beater, but I want it to be good of its kind—very quaint and dry, as I told you; mostly Quebec weather and Quebec legends. But of course the subject matter is a secret between us.
I hope you will have a splendid trip, and that you’ll see the Hambourgs. They’ve both been ill, and I’m very much worried about Isabelle, and I’d like to hear from you how she seems.
Of course as soon as I do get to New York I’ll report at the office.
With love and good wishes for a good journey
Yours
Willa Cather
Please send me Zona Gale’s new book [Borgia], and a book on Greek Domestic Life, or Greek Family Life in the time of the early church, that you published long ago. I remember an excellent sketch of the Empress Theodora in it, but have forgotten the title [probably The Byzantine Achievement, by Robert Byron].
W. S. C.
Yale French professor Albert G. Feuillerat apparently wrote Cather with questions as part of his work on an article about her books. On May 16, 1930, he published “Romancières américaines: Miss Willa Cather” in Figaro.
TO ALBERT G. FEUILLERAT
November 6, 1929
My dear Mr. Feuillerat:
I am sending you a pamphlet which my publisher sends to colleges and clubs that write to him for information about my books. At the back of this pamphlet there is a list of books which give such information, and I have marked the two which I think might be most helpful to you. The book “Spokesmen” by Professor [T. K.] Whipple, contains the latest and most comprehensive study of my books. The biographical sketch at the beginning of this pamphlet will answer one of your questions at least.
Your inquiry regarding a possible French influence is hard to answer. I began to read French when I was fifteen or sixteen, and for a great many years enjoyed the French prose writers from Victor Hugo down to [Guy de] Maupassant much more than I did English writers of the same periods. I never cared so much for French poetry as for English poetry; but almost any French prose seemed to me a little better than English prose, quite apart from the quality of the writer. Before I was twenty I had read all of the novels of Balzac a good many times. Now I do not read him very often. I don’t think I ever longed to “imitate” one French writer more than another, but in all the great French writers I have felt a greater freedom than in English writers of the same period; they experimented more often and had a wider range of variety—usually seemed a little more direct and sincere. About nearly all the fine old English novelists (before Thomas Hardy) there is a curiously professional tone toward the reader, a joviality a good deal like that of the landlord welcoming guests at an inn. When I was much younger this tone irritated me, I remember. I do not mind it so much now; it seems a manner like other manners, but perhaps the absence of this conventional geniality in French novelists pleased me, beside their range of interest was so much wider—their theme was not always the same story of how some one got settled in life.
I have written a long letter and yet I have told you very little of what I mean. I think I must always have cared for something nervous and direct and supple in French prose itself, when I was too young to think about it or reason about it. It excited me more than English prose, just as the air in high altitudes always makes me feel better and stronger than the air at sea level.
I may say that of all the French writers I have cared so much for at one time and another, I think I now enjoy Prosper Merimée perhaps more than any of the others. I feel as if the qualities which give me so much pleasure in other French prose are particularly present in him. I believe he is not fashionable in France at present, but he has almost everything I like in a writer—along with a proud reserve that makes me respect him.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. I think an essay I once wrote, called “The Novel Démeublé” will give you exactly the information you want. You will find a convenient edition of it listed on the last page of the pamphlet I am enclosing with this letter.
Sincerely
Willa Cather
Cather had reached the point in her career where honors began to pile up. In addition to the growing number of honorary degrees, she was notified in November 1929 of her election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
November 25, 1929
My dear Miss Gale:
As I feared, I won’t be able to accept the invitation from you [to come to Gale’s home town of Portage, Wisconsin] which pleased and tempted me so much. I shall have to go to my mother in Pasadena just as soon as possible after Christmas—which means that work is pretty much out of the question for this winter. But it is a lovely thing for me to remember that you did want to have me there, and I am not going to give up hoping for a sojourn near you at some future time. Things have been hitting me pretty hard of late, you know. You remember when Kent is in the stocks waiting for Lear, and says “Fortune turn thy wheel.”
On the long, slow train ride down from New Hampshire I read your new book [Borgia] with such delight and amusement—amusement that was rather grim. Of course we are all Borgias—especially when we really get interested in other people and have kind intentions. I nearly ruined the life of a young brother by bringing him off the farm and giving him what I thought were “advantages”. But one cannot live isolated in a test tube—and most contacts are pernicious.
If you come to New York before Christmas, or soon afterward, please let me know. I want very much to tell you about something that I wished to speak of when I saw you last fall, and didn’t. And I want to hear how things have turned out for the nice daughter you had with you—I did like that girl so much.
Always faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
Warner Brothers had produced a silent film of A Lost Lady in 1924, starring Irene Rich and George Fawcett, and now, with the emergence of sound films, sought to remake the movie. Talking actors introduced new considerations for Cather.
TO MANLEY AARON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
November 29, 1929
My dear Miss Aaron:
My hesitation about letting Warner Brothers have the sound rights of “A Lost Lady” has been due partly to the fact that they offered me a very low price and partly to the fact that I do not want my name attached to dialogue written by some person whose name and ability I do not know.
Of course, if they would agree to make no further use of my name than to say at the beginning of the film “Adapted from the novel of that name by Willa Cather,” I believe I would feel no further hesitation in the matter and would let them have it at the price they offer. I would however want a signed statement from them that they would, in all the advertising, use that phrase—“Adapted from the novel of that name by Willa Cather” or “Adapted from Willa Cather’s novel.” In case they are not willing to confine themselves to this limited use of my name, I would certainly want to have something to say about the person who should write the dialogue for a sound picture. I am writing you this letter because I have just heard that an old friend of mine, Zoë Akins, who writes for the movies is still in Hollywood. She is under contract at the Fox studio, I think; but the Warners might be able to make some arrangement to get her for the job, if they wished to take the trouble. Zoe Akins knows the period in which my story is laid, the part of the country in which it occurs and the kind of people who appear in it. Moreover, I feel pretty sure that she would do the best she could for me. You might send Warner Brothers a copy of this letter or extracts from it, and they could give you an answer. What they do not seem to realize is that I am absolutely unwilling to have the dialogue of the sound production written by some one I don’t know, and then have my own name used in connection with it.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
December 20 [1929]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Dorothy:
I feel as if I must manage to reach you at Christmas time, though I’ve no idea where you are. Forgive this dreary letter-paper—could anything be a better index of the dreary way in which I now live? I can’t take an apartment, you see, when I have to make two trips a year to California. I’m going there again in January.
Dear Dorothy, I can’t thank you enough for the letter you wrote me from Spain this summer. I still have it by me. It reached me in my little house at Grand Manan, an island about thirty-five miles out from the New Brunswick shore. I went up there immediately after the Yale Commencement and stayed until late in September—really got rested and began to like life again. Then I went to a place I often stay in New Hampshire and came back to town in November, because I had to see my dentist, oculist, lawyer, etc. One does have to come back to cities for some things, and it’s easiest where one has connections all ready made (I mean all ready, not already.) But as soon as I get back here, I get rather used up. The old New York of ten years ago wouldn’t tire me, but the present New York—words fail me!
Yes, that actress in Pittsburgh was Lizzie Hudson Collier, cousin of Willie Collier. I wonder where she is now? She was as kind and good as new milk, or fresh bread. The worst of living fast and hard is that one can’t keep in touch with all the people one cared for. But the first little circle, I’ve always kept close to them. I yesterday sent off eight Christmas boxes, (very carefully chosen and bought, the contents) to as many old women on farms within 25 miles of Red Cloud. There used to be fourteen of them (not so old, then) Swedish, Danish, German, Bohemian, Irish. In all these years, since the early Pittsburgh days, I’ve never been too poor or too busy or too sick to send them something at Christmas time. I’ve had some true lovers among them.—You see, I’d loved them first. “In her last illness she talked of you so often,” the daughters write me afterward. I live only to get back to those old friends again—as I have kept going back, winter and summer, whenever I could, for half a life-time. But you see I can’t go now, with mother so ill. She’s terribly jealous—it will hurt her if I even stop there.
Mother’s condition changes little—has improved a trifle, they tell me. Please give my love to your mother if you are with her. If you and I have to become the older generation, why in mercy’s name can’t it be done without so much pain? It’s like dying twice.
Well, I honestly set out to write you a cheerful letter—things are not so bad with me; I’m quite well, for instance. Instead of a chatty letter, it’s turned out a homesick wail. I suppose my heart is always out there at Christmas time (it is so bleak, you know; and if one can love the bleak and bare at all—why one loves it more than other things. If I take up a pen at all, I’m very apt to write what I’m thinking hardest about, so you get this queer letter, my poor Dorothy!
However, I do wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, God knows! If you are in town before the end of January, won’t you please let me know at this hotel?
Lovingly
Willa
December 31 [1929]
My Dearest Zoë;
Your wonderful crucifix has made me so homesick for the Southwest! What a touching and powerful thing it is—just the color of the poor believers in their little tawny houses. It’s a precious thing to have in New York. Thank you, with all my heart. I’ll be in California in February. Tonight I am leaving for Quebec to spend the New Year week. It will be lovely up there now—Miss Lewis goes with me and we’re taking a trunk full of coats and sweaters. There are mountains of snow over all this country now. I’ll drink your health in very good champagne tomorrow night, dear Zoë.
With love
Willa
[January 1930]
Hotel Grosvenor, New York City
Dear Mr. Greenslet:
Will you please ask your business office to send me a statement of all royalties paid me in 1929. I must leave for Pasadena in a few weeks and must make my income tax report early.
Hastily
Willa Cather
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
February 6, 1930
Hotel Grosvenor, New York City
Dear Mr. Greenslet:
You have emptied a pretty kettle of fish upon my head! Wasn’t it faithless of you (and, incidently, most illegal) to use my name, without my permission, in your ad. for Laughing Boy? Two old and intimate friends of mine published new books this fall, and their respective publishers asked me to let them use my name in exactly the way you used it. I refused in both cases, because if one begins that sort of thing there is simply no end to it. Sometimes the best possible friends write the worst possible books, and if they come to you and say, “you allowed your name to be used for this book or that book,” what is one going to say in reply? The only way to keep out of embarrassing situations is consistently, and in every case, to keep one’s name out of blurbs and advertisements. It’s quite right that reviewers and people who write professionally about books should be quoted, that is their job and their judgment ought to count for something, but a friendly expression of interest in a book surely ought not to be used in print without one’s consent.
Now that I have got this off my chest, please have someone send me a copy of the new edition of Antonia. Living thus in a hotel, I have none of my own books, and I want to make some corrections in Antonia for the English edition (and for you, if you will make the corrections.)
Also, since I am leaving for California about the 20th, would it be convenient for you to send me my royalty check sometime next week instead of March 1st? I want to get my business affairs all straightened up before I go, if possible.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
March 10 [1930]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
My Dear Dorothy;
Mother had a little chuckle over the Mark Twain dinner picture you sent me. She is a little stronger than last spring but just as helpless,—and her state is just as hopeless.
Sometimes I wonder why they build up a little more strength for people to suffer with. My sister is off for a few days rest and I am kept pretty busy trying to divert mother a little. We have a charming English nurse who has been with her a year now and never fails us. I have a nice little cottage of my own near mother’s cottage, the food here is excellent and I am very comfortable in body. The trouble is one can’t think of much but the general futility of existence.
Willa Cather at the celebration of Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday dinner. Cather is third from the right.
My love to you and your mother. I envy you a New England spring.
Yours always
Willa
The picture was of Cather wearing an uncharacteristically frilly dress when she attended a lavish dinner at Delmonico’s in celebration of Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday in 1905. Harper’s magazine devoted its December 23, 1905, issue to Twain, the dinner, and photographs of the guests in their finery.
In the spring of 1930, Woman’s Home Companion published Cather’s short story “Neighbor Rosicky.”
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
March 19 [1930]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
Dear Twinnies;
Perhaps you’ve seen the first part of “Neighbor Rosicky” in the [“]Woman’s Home Companion”—but I am sending you the first and second parts in another envelope, in case you have not seen it. Your daddy will read it aloud very well, as he knows the characters.
Your grandmother is about the same,—comfortable, and most of the time cheerful. I am hoping to see you in a couple weeks, my dears. I will try to make my stay in Rawlins [Wyoming] on April 12th and 13th. I will let your father know later.
With love from all of us
Aunt Willie
In May, Cather and Lewis sailed for France. Cather needed to make this trip in order to complete Shadows on the Rock, but she also wanted to see her old friends Isabelle and Jan Hambourg.
May 24 [1930]
My Darling mother;
Yesterday Isabelle and I were walking in a park full of grandmothers and children and she, paying attention to the children, turned her ankle and fell forward and cut a deep gash in her knee on a stone. It bled a good deal. We took a taxi home, where I washed it with iodine and bound it up, but I found the flesh was badly torn, and as soon as Jan came home I sent him for a doctor. He said she must stay in bed for several days, as a tear is worse than a cut and may suppurate. Isabelle had a very serious illness in the winter and will have to be an invalid for a long while. It is very sad for me that the two people I love best in the world get sick thousands of miles apart, and I such a poor traveller! I have seen very little of the gay side of Paris as yet, we have been here only a week today, and for the first three days Edith was sick and had to stay in bed, and now Isabelle is laid low with this cut on her knee, and for part of the time I have had a rather queer “tummy” from strange water and worry and being tired. Tell Doctor [Stephen] Smith for me that living-conditions are much pleasanter at Las Encinas than in any Paris hotel I have yet found—even the food there is more to my taste, though French food is always good. In spite of every-one’s being below par physically, I have made two trips over to the queer old part of Paris where part of my new story lies, and have been well rewarded. That part of the city has changed very little, many of the same houses were there when my story-people lived there two hundred and fifty years ago. I went to church at the church they always attended. Many, many things are still the same.
Now I am going over to see Isabelle and be there when the Doctor comes to dress her knee—we will talk of you as we always do. She always wants to hear every little thing about you and the place you are in.
Lovingly
Willa
The next three notes were written on postcards of the Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. Around the picture on the front of the first, Cather wrote, with an arrow to the bell tower, “The bells are in here,—still the same ones,” and, with another arrow and a reference to Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, “This is the parapet from which Quasimodo threw the wicked priest.” The second and third postcards feature images of Notre Dame gargoyles.
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
May 28 [1930]
Paris
Dear Twinnies:
This is the glorious church of which you have read so much. It always looks to me much bigger than any New York sky-scraper. I have often walked about the high parapet from which Quasimodo threw the priest.
TO MARGARET CATHER
May 30 [1930]
Isn’t she a dreadful old bird? Awful to think she has been so full of spite for seven hundred years! I am sure all the figures were Quasimodo’s playfellows, and that he had special friends among them.
W.S.C.
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
[June 1930]
Dear Margaret & Elizabeth;
There are countless figures like these perched all over the many roofs of Notre Dame. You have to climb all over the roofs and tower to see them all. They have been there since the year 1200, some before.
W.S.C.
June 30 [1930]
My Dear Blanche,
I have been very busy doing nothing for five weeks now and am beginning to get a little bored with it. I may go on to Vienna in a few weeks, or I may go home and up to Grand Manan, which seems to be the quietest spot in the world for work. It has been lovely to be so near Isabelle and Jan, we have done lots of nice things together, but I hate to be in a city in summer, even when the city is Paris, and if there is any really wild country in Europe I have never found it. The automobile has spoiled all that. When I first arrived everyone was having influenza, and I had it, too, for a week. I am very well now but I begin to long for green, quiet country. I’ve seen the Hambourgs and checked up on all my historical background, and I came over for those two things. If I decide to go home in August I’ll let you know.
With love to you and greetings to everyone in the office.
Yours
Willa Cather
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
July 1 [1930]
Paris
Dear Mabel:
I’ve been wanting this long while to write you that your article on [D. H.] Lawrence is the only thing I’ve seen which has any of him in it. Everyone else who put in an oar wrote about themselves, as people usually do, but you really wrote about Lawrence, and I got a thrill out of it.
Awfully nice of you to tell me that [Robinson] Jeffers liked the “Archbishop.” “Roan Stallion” is such a glorious poem. I read it in San Francisco and about went to see the man. The short one called “Night” seems to me one of the finest things done in English in many years.
Paris is almost as noisy and crowded as New York. It has changed woefully in seven years. I came only to see a dear friend who has been very ill. Both Edith and I are often homesick for New Mexico, in spite of the many gay things we are doing. I’m darned tired of being gay, to tell the truth. I’d like just to be a vegetable for a few months.
With heartiest love from us both
Willa
Through Jan Hambourg, Cather met the Menuhin family in Paris. The Menuhins—parents Marutha and Moshe, children Yehudi, Hephzibah, and Yaltah—were a gifted musical family who would become some of the most treasured companions of Cather’s later years. Yehudi, considered one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century, began playing publicly at age seven. When Cather met him, he was fourteen years old.
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
July 14 [1930]
My Dear Twinnies;
Naughty Elizabeth, who has not written to me! Nice Margaret who did! Yesterday I climbed up to the tower of Notre Dame again and spent the morning among my old friends, the gargoyles. The stairway is a circular one of white stone, and winds round and round a central column of white stone. It is very dark, lit only here and there by a slit in walls, and only then can one realize the great strength and thickness of the walls of Notre Dame and the huge blocks of cut stone of which they are built, stone fitted into stone with no cement.
Today is the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille in the Revolution, the greatest holiday of the year, and the people are dancing in the street before every little cafe. Late last night Jan and Isabelle drove us about in a taxi to see the dancers in all the little streets in the poor part of the city. Tonight we are all going to dine together at a gay restaurant—a lovely place where I went to lunch three days ago with Yehudi Menuhin the wonderful boy-violinist from San Francisco, and his family. He has two little sisters aged nine and seven who are almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he. They were in Paris only one day and we had a very exciting [time]. The one aged 7½ last winter wrote me a dear little letter about the “Archbishop”! All three have golden hair and skin like cream and roses—simply fairy-tale children. Their parents are nice, too, especially the mother.
I am enclosing a check for Virginia, to help with her college expenses, and I’m awfully pleased that she got the scholarship.
With my dearest love to you all
Willa Cather
How awful that they translate “Notre Dame de Paris” the Hunchback of Notre Dame!
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
August 21 [1930]
Grand Hôtel d’Aix, Aix-les-Bains, France
My Dear Blanche;
I have been gloriously doing nothing here for three weeks, after very interesting but rather tiring travelling in Provençe. I love Aix, and this year it is not at all crowded. I’ve always thought the cooking and pastry of Savoie the best in France, and, alas, I have picked up a couple pounds! I expect to sail on the Empress of Scotland, September 20, landing at Quebec and going straight down to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to the old hotel where I always work in comfort and quiet. I dont want to go to New York until I have finished the last part of the book. I’ve been too lazy to work over here, and seeing too many old friends. I had two thrilling weeks motoring through the wild coast and mountains about Marseille—I’ve wanted for years to explore it.
The Hambourgs are now in Salzburg, at the Mozart festival, but they will meet me in Paris September 4th.
My love to you and Alfred and best wishes to everyone in the office.
Yours
Willa Cather
September 30 [1930]
aboard the Canadian Pacific S. S. Empress of France
My Dearest Dorothy:
Your letter, telling me of your mother’s death, reached me in Paris on the day before I sailed for home. Isabelle and I happened to have been talking of her the night before. I am sorry on your account, but almost glad on your dear mother’s. She was too keen and alert to linger in a clouded state—when she had a good day she must have felt that something had broken or given way, and that would have distressed her. When I last saw her, after her trip ’round the world, she was entirely and vigorously herself, all her colors flying. I thought she had not changed in the least. I am glad I can remember her like that. But these vanishings, that come one after another, have such an impoverishing effect upon those of us who are left—our world suddenly becomes so diminished—the landmarks disappear and all the splendid distances behind us close up. These losses, one after another, make one feel as if one were going on in a play after most of the principal characters are dead.
I have been in France since the middle of May and am now on my way to Quebec. From the middle of October I shall be in Jaffrey N.H. for some weeks and perhaps I can run up to see you some day.
My mother’s condition is unchanged. The doctors tell me she is so strong that she may live for five or six years in this state. Goodbye, dear Dorothy. I’m so sorry that you’ve had this break to face, but oh I’m glad for your mother and for you too that she was not punished by a long and helpless and utterly hopeless illness.
My love to you, from a full heart.
Willa
Sunday [October 5, 1930]
Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City
Dear Blanche and Alfred;
I was so glad to get your message at sea, and your good wishes for me were fully realized. I had a fine crossing, and anything more lovely than the approach to this continent by way of the St. Lawrence, when all the wild forests of its shores and islands are blazing with autumn color, I have never seen. I meant to go on immediately to Boston and Jaffrey, but I got rather a thrill out of journeying straight from Paris to Quebec, and as the weather is glorious I shall stay on here until Tuesday. My story comes to life as soon as I get back here and I get a good deal of pleasure out of playing with it. Books, alas, are like children,—never so much fun after they grow up and are finished as they are when they are merely things to play with and all your own. I’ve learned to get my fun before publication. I’ll write you soon from Jaffrey.
Affectionately
Willa Cather
In 1930, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Cather the William Dean Howells Medal for Death Comes for the Archbishop. The medal is given every five years to honor the best book by an American writer published during the previous half decade. That same year, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon receiving her letter of congratulation, Lewis responded that he thought Cather ought to have been the recipient, and said that he considered A Lost Lady one of the very best books in American literary history.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
November 6 [1930]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Roscoe;
Gold medal very large and handsome—weighs several pounds—gold with no alloy at all—handy for a paperweight. I’m going to take it to [the] bank to have it weighed and valued. It’s one thing you can turn into money—one flattering phrase that’s worth something!
I send you a very good editorial from the N.Y. Times, and I think that is just why Lewis got the Nobel award. We look like that to Europe, and all those Swedish chore boys we kicked around are telling us what they think of us. I expect we really are like that. Anyhow, I like Lewis and I wrote him that though I couldn’t honestly say I’d rather he got the award than I, I’d rather he had it than anyone else. The newspaper discussed the award so much that thousands of good people think I did get it, and my mail is full of dozens of begging letters from preachers and widows and orphans; “please help me with just a little of that $47,000”!
I send you a copy of Judge [Robert] Grant’s speech made in conferring the medal. You might send it and the newspaper clippings to Elsie. She might be interested to see them and I have over two hundred letters to dictate before I can begin to work, or even have my tooth filled, so I’ve not much time for family correspondence.
Mr. [George] Whicher of Amherst was to bring Virginia and Tom up to dine with me in Jaffrey on the first Sunday in December, but this medal affair called me away before my appointed time, and now I won’t get back. I’m going to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving, to some old friends who will give me some dinner and a bedroom and study—and let me alone.
With much love to you and yours
Willie
Send the checks to me at this address, please
At the ceremony where she received her Howells medal, Cather met the American sculptor and writer Lorado Taft.
TO LORADO TAFT
November 17, 1930
New York City
My dear Mr. Taft:
As I had to leave the platform before the exercises were over last Friday, in order to catch a train, I did not have an opportunity for a short conversation with you. Though I was alone with you for a few moments before the program began, you were then occupied with the address you were soon to deliver. I simply wanted to tell you how much pleasure your fountain near the Art Institute in Chicago has given me for many years. I have to go West two or three times every year and I never go through Chicago, even when the interval between trains in short, without taking a cab and driving over to the Art Institute for another glimpse at that fountain. It always delights me. There is in it everything that I feel about the Great Lakes, and it always puts me in a hopeful, holiday mood. I do not know whether you yourself think it an especially fine thing, but I do. I do not know why I like it so much, because I know very little about sculpture. But it seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
January 14, 1931
My dear Mr. Bain:
Yes, of course I get a great many “fan” letters as you call them—but most of them are pretty thin wind, I assure you. It is very easy to pick out the real ones. Of course, as you intimate, it is a very distinct disadvantage to be a Lady Author—anybody who says it isn’t, is foolish. Virginia Woolf makes a pretty fair statement of the disadvantages [in A Room of One’s Own]. But young children are neither very male nor very female, and I find that the impressions and memories that hang on from those early days of having no particular sex, are the safest ones to trust to—and the pleasantest ones to play with. I am glad you liked the two particular books you mention—but myself I always feel that “A Lost Lady” is, artistically, more successful than either of them.
Cordially yours,
Willa Cather
January 14, 1931
Dear Norman Foerster:
No, I cannot accept your kind invitation. I simply never give lectures or talks of the kind you suggest. I used to, very occasionally, but since my mother has been an invalid I have had no time for these things.
I have not written you before because I have wanted to write you a long letter about your book [Toward Standards: A Study of the Present Critical Movement in American Letters], and Heaven only knows when I will have time to do so. I am just finishing a new book of my own and will soon go to my mother in California. I read your book very carefully and with great interest. I am awfully glad you wrote it, and I agree with you in the main—in your opinions on the history of criticism and the critical mind, but I do feel that you take a little group of American critics, I might say of New York critics, too seriously. This of course is entirely confidential, but I think of the men you mention, Randolph Bourne and, in a less degree, [Henry Seidel] Canby, were the only ones who had that instantaneous perception and absolute conviction about quality which a good critic must have. You understand me; it is a thing like an ear for music. You can tell when a singer flats, or you cannot tell. You cannot be taught to distinguish that error.
Take, for example, an intelligent and serious man like Stuart Sherman. (And please don’t think there is anything personal in this—he always treated me very generously indeed.) I knew him quite well. He was absolutely lacking in the quality I speak of. He could take a writer as a subject; talk about him and read about him and worry his brain over the matter, and say a great many interesting things about this writer—many of them true. But it was all from the outside. It was a thing worked up, studied out.
What I mean is this: suppose that Sherman had read all the novels of Joseph Conrad except the “Nigger of the Narcissus”, that he had written about them and read what other critics had to say about them until he knew a great deal about these books and their quality. If all this were true, and I had taken a dozen pages from the “Nigger of the Narcissus” and mixed them up with a dozen pages written by Conrad’s fairly intelligent imitators (people like Francis Brett Young for example), it would have been utterly impossible for Stuart Sherman to pick out the Conrad pages from the second rate stuff.
A fine critic must have something more than a studious nature and high ideals, and the very best criticism I happen to know was not written by professional critics at all. Henry James was a very fine critic I think; and so was Walter Pater. And so was Prosper Mérimée (Do you know his essay on Gogol? That’s what I call criticism!).
I don’t mean that all fine artists in prose have been good critics. Of course Turgenev was a very poor critic.
But on the whole, composers are the best judges of new musical compositions and writers are the best judges of new kinds of writing. I mean they are better judges than either musical scholars or literary scholars. But this is only a little of a great deal that I would like to say to you about your book, which does exactly what a book of that sort ought to do—makes me want to come back at you and have it out with you, both where I agree and where I disagree.
Always cordially yours,
Willa Cather
January 20
P.S. This letter was written some days ago—but my secretary [Sarah Bloom] begged me not to send it. “Just the sort of indiscreet letter that falls into the wrong hands and makes you a lot of enemies for nothing,” says she. However, as she has gone to Cuba for her vacation, I think I’ll send it anyhow. I feel that it won’t fall into the wrong hands, and that you won’t quote me—even to your publisher, who is rather a chatter-box.
Yours,
Willa Cather
January 14, 1931
The Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Mrs. Grippen:
Excuse delay in replying to your letter. I have been travelling. I think I can enlighten your perplexity. Myra Henshaw [in My Mortal Enemy] before her death came to consider Oswald as her “mortal enemy”;—she came to believe that anything loved selfishly and fiercely and extravagantly became the enemy of one’s soul’s peace. Please tell your ladies that that simple fact is the subject of the story.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Knopf published Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of D. H. Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos, in 1932. Cather read the book before it was published, the same way she read Luhan’s personal memoir, Intimate Memories.
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
January 17 [1931]
35 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Dear Mabel;
I’ve just finished “Lorenzo in Taos” with great admiration. It’s as good as the Buffalo part of “Intimate Memories”. It’s like a big canvas full of gorgeous color and thrilling people—and motion. It’s the constant changes in the personal equations and in the emotional climate that make the book so exciting. Everything that goes on between the people is unexpected and unforeseen, as things usually are in life and so seldom are in the pages of a novelist. I don’t always agree with you in your interpretation of your people and their motives, but I always agree with the way it’s done—with your presentation of your own interpretation, I mean. Everybody in the story is alive and full of behaviour—except a few colorless people whom you have the good sense to let alone. Perhaps you’re a little hard on Frieda [Lawrence], a little hard on [Dorothy] Brett—but you’ve made ’em as you saw ’em and they and all the rest keep the ball rolling. You’ve done Tony [Luhan] magnificently! I wouldn’t have thought anybody could do him so well. It’s splendid, and not over-done. And you’ve done yourself better than anywhere except in the early Buffalo volumes. In the Italian part of the memories I always felt that a stream of interesting people went across the page but that you as a person disappeared. Here you re-appear with a bang! I imagine that it’s because your eye is fixed on Lawrence and you do yourself rather incidentally that you succeed so well. It’s amazingly spontaneous and amazingly true. I’m sure it’s the best portrait there ever will be of Lawrence himself. I’m amused at your struggle with his giggle. Was it a giggle? Wasn’t it more like a snicker? Not snigger, but snicker? To me giggle is always fat and jolly.
I simply love the way you do the Taos country and the weather. When I was writing about it in a very formal and severe manner, as befits the eye of a priest and the pen of a stranger, I kept thinking that I would love to see it done intimately, as part and parcel of somebody’s personal life—not a background! (about once a week I get a letter from some puppy who tells me he has done a story of sophisticated easterners in a New Mexican background, or some other kind of simper with a New Mexican background.) I wish to God I could have put the Archbishop in Kansas or Nebraska—not many sensitive artistic natures have the grit to follow you there. It’s a great advantage to work in a part of the country that is distinctly déclassé—it rids you [of] superficial writers and superficial readers. But this is a long departure. When a country like the Taos country is really a part of your life, and when your life is a form of living and not a little camera,—well, then it all works up very stunningly together. Few things have ever given me more joy than the night you all spent chasing about in [the] alfalfa field. Why Tony’s car becomes a positive god of vengeance, a frightful threat to the foolishness of all of you, and to a whole school of thinking that has upset the old balance of things, where personal desires and emotions were masked under a National consciousness or a tribe will, or the particular false-front of any ones social period.
Edith is in Boston for a week, or she would probably be writing you at the same time. She read Lorenzo through before she left.
I’ll be leaving for California in a few weeks, to join my mother. Her condition is about the same. The doctors tell me it may go on five or six years like this. She seems to get pleasure out of being with us, even in such a wretchedly helpless state. I have to stop off in San Francisco, so I’ll probably go over the northern route. But my next long trip will be to Mexico City. I’m envious that you’ve beat me to it.
With heartiest congratulations
Willa Cather
February 19 [1931]
The Parkside, New York City
My dearest mother:
Just a word to you from this hotel where I am waiting for Mary Virginia to come to dinner with me. Thank Douglass for his reassuring telegrams. Indeed I will get to you just as soon as possible—that will be very soon now.
My book is done! My publisher went to Paris soon after Christmas when the book was only about two thirds done. We rushed copies of the manuscript on to him some weeks ago, and he read it in Paris and sent me this cable for a Valentine. Everyone at the office likes it better than “The Archbishop.” I do not like it better, but I think it as good a piece of work.
I am now reading the proofs—Douglass will explain to you what that means, and I am correcting many mistakes—some are the fault of the printers, and some are my own fault. It is so easy to make a little slip in a book so full of dates and historical happenings. One simply has to get them right.
But it won’t be long now until you get a telegram telling you by what train I am coming. I expect to leave New York on the fourth of March, and will go straight through, stopping one night in Chicago to rest.
Here comes M.V. so goodbye with much love from us both
[Unsigned]
TO JOSEPHINE GOLDMARK
March 3, 1931
My dear Miss Goldmark:
I had so counted upon having a long evening’s talk with you about your book [Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America], but the serious illness of two of my friends has cut my winter all to pieces, and now I am hurrying off to California because my mother’s condition has changed for the worse.
It is very difficult to tell you in a letter about the things which delighted me in your book—not this chapter or that, but the whole thing, moving along with such a refreshing calm and such an absence of that nervous tendency to force things up. I read it slowly evening after evening, and it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people who have become one’s friends by the time one reaches port. I enjoyed the Brandeis family as much as the Goldmarks, and Frederika is surely charming enough to give a perfume to any book. What a charm and distinction there is about the personality of your mother as she appears in this book—I wish I could have met her. I am so interested in the daguerreotype picture of her—I think your sister Pauline looks very much like her.
You see, I have known a great many of those German and Bohemian families myself, in the West, three generations of them living together in little towns. I have watched the original pioneers growing old and the third generation growing up, all getting rooted into the soil and interweaving and becoming a part of the very ground. I began to watch it as a young child—it delighted me even then, and keeping in touch with those communities and watching the slow flowering of life has been one of my greatest pleasures. Your book brought it all back to me; the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiments and allied blood. These many characters influencing each other by chance give a book a greater unity than any plan you could have made. As I have already said, reading it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people whom one likes so well that one is sorry to come into port. They have everything that was nicest about the old world and the old time, and I put your book down with a sense that even if I do not like the present very well, we have had a beautiful past.
With very deep gratitude for the happy evenings I spent with your Pilgrims of ’48, for the memories they awoke and for the hope they give me for the future, I am
Your very true friend,
Willa Cather
[March 12, 1931]
Crossing Kansas
Dearest Irene;
This morning I wakened wondering if you were awake—I had been dreaming that you and I were on the Burlington, going out to the Golden Wedding together! At first I felt sad—then very happy. I did not really deserve that happy time. I had never been a very thoughtful daughter. My mind and heart were always too full of my one all-absorbing passion. I took my parents for granted. But, deserving or not, I had it, and there is no one in the round world whom I would have chosen before you to share it with me. You were just the right one, and I shall always be thankful for that trip we had together back to our own little town. I’m glad nobody met us at Hastings. I remember every mile of the way home, don’t you? And the bitter cold in which we left Chicago? You see you are the only person who reaches back into the very beginning who has kept on being a part of my life in the world where, for some reason I have to go on and on, from one change to another. The other friends, Isabelle and Edith and Mr. McClure and many others, don’t go so far back. And the dear Red Cloud friends (Carrie and Mary dearest of all) have not been so much in my later life as you have. With you I can speak both my languages; you know the names of all the people dear to me in childhood, and the names of most of those who have grown into my life as I go along. I suppose that is why I crowd so much information about the MENUHINS and the new friends on you. I want somebody from Sandy Point to go along with me to the end. My brothers are loyal and kind but they are not interested in these things. I feel so grateful to you for having kept your interest. Carrie and Mary are so loyal to our old ideals, but they have not been in my later life so much as you, geography, long distances have been against us. I am always so glad Mary and Doctor [E. A. Creighton] were in New York that winter, and of course came to tea and met my friends.
When I go back to Red Cloud to stay for a few months sometime, you must come; Mr. Weisz must surely spare you to me for a little while.
So lovingly
Willie
This train jumps about so—I’m afraid you won’t be able to read this scrawl at all.
March 17 [1931]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
Dear Sister;
I won’t write you a letter until I return from San Francisco and am more settled in mind. Mother has failed so much since I last saw her, but she does have some hours of restful quiet each day, I think. She is not in pain—just the weariness and discomfort of every physical act growing harder and harder. Sometimes she is quite cheerful for an hour, and she goes out in her chair every day and wants to go.
I am going up to San Francisco to take a Doctor of Laws at Berkeley, and devoutly hope that someone here will move out of a cottage while I am away. I am in the main building, next the dining room, and don’t get much rest.
I don’t think you could help much if you were here, dear. Mother is conscious, but her perceptions are so dim—with occasional hours when she seems to understand.
Mrs. Bates is so good to her, and so consciencious, and Douglass I think does more for her than any man ever did for any woman since the world began.
With love
Willa
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
April 2 [1931]
Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, California
Dear Alfred;
I’ve written Mr. Levinson that I cannot speak for him. I’d never get away from here without making a lecture tour if I did!
I agree with you that a type jacket with distinction and style would be best, and I shall be very honored if you see fit to add to it any words over your signature.
Yehudi’s arrival was splendid; it brought all the clans together, as it were. Do you know the Ehrmans and the Helmans? They are the most enchanting people. Sidney Ehrman started Yehudi, long ago (five years, to be accurate!) and they are, through the Jacobys, distantly related to a Mrs. Charles Wiener who lives here now, and who started me on my road in Red Cloud Nebraska, when I was ten years old. I suppose I got a kind of Hebrew complex at that age, and the grand Jews still seem to me the most magnificent people on earth. They simply get me, I’m theirs, I can’t refuse anything.
Hastily
W.S.C.
TO GEORGE L. STIMSON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
April 18, 1931
Pasadena, California
Dear Mr. Stimson;
A Catholic attorney [Garret McEnerney], the most celebrated lawyer on this coast, has found some bothersome “errors in Catholicism” in our page proofs. I can get out of them with safety, but it will hold the works up a couple of weeks, and will mean another set of proofs for Miss Lewis to go over after the corrections are made. I feel awfully apologetic to all the office, and especially to you.
To call a Bishop an Archbishop is unpardonable carelessness—but the french sources I read, of course use the same word, Monsiegneur, for both Bishop and Archbishop. And who on earth (but a Catholic) could guess that until about 1900 it was not permitted to say a mass for individual souls on All Souls’ day! One could only have masses for the dead in general, it seems.
With this book I bid adieu to Rome—otherwise you and Alfred Knopf would have to become converts in order to keep me out of trouble.
I’m terribly sorry to make you all so much trouble, and I do feel rather an idiot. However, thank God for the San Francisco lawyer who will at least have enabled me to conceal my blunders from the Catholic world in general.
Faithfully
W.S.C.
May 2 [1931]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
Dear Roscoe;
Last summer in Paris I had a travelling case made exactly like Jan Hambourg’s. The Knopfs gave me a very handsome one for Christmas, and as this one I got is really a man’s case, and I have never used it, I am sending it to you. You may find it convenient for the many trips you take about the state. It has my initials on, but you can have those changed. My initials seem to be familiar ones now-a-days. An initialed cigarette case which I had used was lately sold for twenty-five dollars at a Catholic church fair. And for so many years my cigarette case was a family skeleton! Well, all things come to him who waits.
Did you see the ballad in the May Atlantic Monthly [Cather’s poem “Poor Marty”]? It’s said to be very good. Mother is well these days, but I got chilled after a hot walk and have had a tummy-ache for three days, like a colic[k]y baby!
With love to you all
Willie
Sunday [June 14?,1931]
New York City
Dear Dorothy;
I got back a few days ago and go down to Princeton tonight for another of those degrees you are always joking me about. (How avoid ’em is the question? By sailing in May—but I can’t sail every year.) Your letter reached me last night and makes me very happy. About this book I have no feeling at all—except the kind of gratitude you feel toward an old fur coat that has kept you warm through a long cold Atlantic crossing. It has been like a little tapestry tent that I could unfold in hotels and sanitariums and strange places and forget the bleakness about me. Quebec always gives me that sense of loyalty, of being faithful to something.
To recapture that feeling, and to get the sense of the North, was all I tried for. Every little detail of the way they lived is from some old book or letter. The search for all those little things helped me to hold my life together. How much it can mean to people who don’t know the history of the period at all, I don’t know. Jacques is the little nephew [Charles E. Cather] I love the best. I had him all that beautiful winter before Father died—he was only five (5) then. I stopped in Nebraska to see him for a day last week. He’s just the same—remembers everything we did together. “I guess I liked when you used to pull me up the hill on my sled the best of all,” he said softly. Such a faithful, loving little heart! Those late afternoon sled-rides were dear to me, too.
I’ll be here for about 12 days (business matters) then Grand Manan!
Lovingly
Willa
TO PAVELKA BOYS, POSSIBLY EDWARD AND EMIL PAVELKA
June 26, 1931
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Boys:
I expect you think I have forgotten all about you and your Commencement, but you are quite mistaken. I was delighted to get your pictures and have shown them to many of my friends in Pasadena and New York, telling them “That is the kind of fine Bohemian boys we have in Nebraska”. It grieves me to think that Annie [Pavelka] hasn’t any little boys any more, but I am very proud of all the big boys. My brother-in-law, Mr. [James William] Auld of Red Cloud, was here yesterday and he said he had seen one of you at some fair or athletic show not long ago, and that he was well pleased with you.
One reason you have not heard from me is that I have been graduating myself! I hurried on East to take a degree at Princeton and I had a very exciting time. At the President’s dinner Colonel Lindbergh took me out to dinner and sat at my right, and the next day I lunched with him and Mrs. Lindbergh. I met a great many fine people, and they treated me well, I assure you.
It made me very sad to hurry through Nebraska and not see any of you, but I am coming to see you all before another year goes by. I promise myself that, every time I feel blue. You see, it is only the fact that my mother has been so ill and helpless in California that has kept me away from Nebraska. All the time I have for visiting must go to her.
With love to you both and a great deal of love to your mother and Elizabeth [Pavelka] and all your brothers, I am always
Faithfully your friend,
Willa Cather
June 26, 1931
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Father Talbot:
I don’t think my book could have given you much more pleasure than your gracious letter of approval gives me. If you have been studying the early history of Quebec, you well know how contradictory their own histories are, and how difficult it is to come at a fair estimate of some of the men who are prominent in that period. I have been going to Quebec for many years and the thing that I always feel there, the thing that I admire, is a certain loyalty to language and religion and tradition. Some of those qualities are essentially French; but in Quebec they seem more moving and rather more noble than in France itself. Quebec seems to me more like a period than a place—like something cut off from France of 200 years ago, which, in some respects, was certainly finer than the France of today or America of today. I feel that the Rock still stands there, though so many generations have come and gone and cast their shadows in the sunlight for a little while.
There are some intentional inaccuracies; the King’s warehouse, at that time, was at the mouth of the River Charles—it was not until some years later that it was placed where I put it in my story. But in all the larger matters I tried to be as accurate as I could.
Thanking you most cordially for your very heartening encouragement, I am
Most sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
PS: I think I ought to tell you that I made some rather grave errors in Catholic practice in the original manuscript (such as having Mass said for an individual soul on All Souls Day) and that these errors were corrected by an extremely intelligent and brilliant Catholic woman, Mrs. Garret McEnerney, the wife of the celebrated San Francisco lawyer.
[June 21, 1931]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dearest Zoë
Princeton went off with a bang! I had Lindbergh for my dinner partner at the President’s dinner, and lunched with him and Mrs. Lindberg[h] next day. All her photographs to the contrary, she is fascinating!
Lovingly
Willa
July 10 [1931]
Dear Blanche;
I’m still busy settling the house and drying all the linens and bedding in the sun. The little house sits on the very edge of the cliff, and the sea fogs come in just as they do into a boat. Besides, the place was not opened up at all last summer, so rust and mould got a good start. We’ll be spick and span in a few days.
Please ask Alfred not to telegraph me the results of his correspondence with his London agent regarding “Shadows”. No telegraph station on the island; all telegrams telephoned out under the Bay, and I have to go two miles to the nearest telephone to receive messages. I can easily reply to a letter by telegram, however.
Blanche, please get Charles the grocer to send me two cans of Italian Tomato Paste, two heads of garlic, and a pound of wild rice. It’s the only shop that carries wild rice. Oh yes! please send me half-a-dozen small jars of Caviar (the 65¢ size keep best) ask Charles’ salesman to under-value these things about half in his declaration, as the duty on food stuffs is now from fifty to eighty-five percent.
This is an interesting letter, surely! But I’ll do better later.
With love
Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock, Cather’s ninth novel, was published in August of 1931.
July 31 [1931]
My Dear Alfred;
Because of the varying schedule of the one boat which is our only mail carrier, I got your letters of the 24th and 27th on the same day!
First, regarding the Heinemann situation [concerning negotiations for a collected edition in England]. I don’t think their attitude very cordial or very promising, since they refuse to bind themselves to anything at all. I have made up my mind to let you go ahead with Cassell. I will have to write a letter to Evans, of course, and I will send you a copy of it. Meanwhile you may cable Salzberg to go ahead with Cassell, so far as I am concerned.
The news you write me about the initial distribution of the new book is delightful, and is a great surprise to me. I still see in that book only a story to please the quiet and meditative few. As it has got beyond that circle, I can only conclude that you and Blanche, and your office, and the “Archbishop” of four years ago, all had a good deal to do with bringing this bashful volume out before the curtain. I think the review in the Atlantic will make up the minds of a great many people who think they are intelligent, but unguided would probably have passed this book over as a dull one.
I have just finished the longest of the three stories I mean for the next volume, and have sent it down to my secretary to be typed. It will run about 23,000 words. We had spoken of “Obscure Destinies” as a title for that volume of three stories. Would you like “Out West” better? They are all western stories; one in Colorado, one in Kansas, one in Nebraska.
Tell Blanche the things from Charles came when much needed—especially the garlic and tomato paste, which you can’t get in Protestant Canada; and yesterday [I] made a risotto that would make your mouth water. I can still get excellent champagne in St. John, Pol Roger 1919, that excellent year, which I couldn’t get in Paris at all, nor anywhere but at Aix-les-Bains. This island is always beautiful, and the weather has been so wild and dramatic that I cannot stay at a desk very long. The climate is everything else in God’s world,—but is never hot or sticky.
My love to you both, and my very deep gratitude to you and all your staff for the splendid way they have stood behind this book. It gives me a lighter heart for the books to come.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
August 10 [1931]
My Dearest Mother;
The weather has been all sun and blue sea for the last week, and I have been taking some splendid long walks along the high cliffs where there are no houses for many miles and one never meets a soul. The islanders keep that stretch wild to pasture their cows in. Next week I won’t have time to walk much, for hundreds of letters have been pouring in about my new book. My secretary in New York answers most of them, but there are many from old friends and important people that I must answer myself—enough to keep me very busy all next week.
I’m sorry that horrible picture of me got onto the front page of the magazine called “Time”, but I couldn’t help it. One just has to grin and bear such things. If I mourned about accidents like that, and about the things jealous, disappointed newspaper men write about me, I could just mourn my life away—which I don’t intend to do. When the “Archbishop” first came out, all the reviews were unfavorable and many of them savage. Now those same newspapers call it a ‘classic’.
My dearest love to Elsie, and I will write her as soon as I get caught up with my mail.
With my dearest love,
Willie
Dear Elsie and Douglass; please be sure to read the sketch and review in the Atlantic Monthly. It is in the “Atlantic Bookshelf”, in the front advertising pages.
The August 1931 Atlantic Monthly published a glowing review of Shadows on the Rock by Ethel Wallace Hawkins. A review by Wilbur Cross, a former Yale English professor who became governor of Connecticut in 1930, was published in the Saturday Review of Literature, which later published, with permission, the following letter that Cather wrote to Cross in response.
TO WILBUR CROSS
August 25 [1931]
Grand Manan Island
Dear Governor Cross;
I want to thank you most heartily for the first understanding review I have seen of my new book. You seem to be the first person who sees what a different kind of method I tried to use from that which I used in the “Archbishop”. I tried, as you say, to state the mood and the view-point in the title. To me the rock of Quebec is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. There another age persists. There, among the country people and the nuns, I caught something new to me; a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but which I could not but admire. It is hard to state that feeling in language; it was more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacoluthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear. I took the incomplete air and tried to give it what would correspond to a sympathetic musical setting; tried to develop it into a prose composition not too conclusive, not too definite; a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced; a kind of thinking, a mental complexion inherited, left over from the past, lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation.
Now it seemed to me that the mood of the mis-fits among the early settlers (and there were a good many) must have been just that. An orderly little French household that went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick their house down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the forests. And, as you seem to recognize, once having adopted a tone so definite, once having taken your seat in the close air by the apothecary’s fire, you can’t explode into military glory, any more than you can pour champagne into a salad dressing. (I don’t believe much in rules, but Stevenson laid down a good one when he said: you can’t mix kinds.) And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and on occasion died for it, as if it really were a sacred fire–––and all this temperately and shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by good sense.
It’s very hard for an American to catch that rhythm–––it’s so unlike us. But I made an honest try, and I got a great deal of pleasure out of it, if nobody else does! And surely you’ll agree with me that our writers experiment too little, and produce their own special brand too readily.
With deep appreciation of the compliment you pay me in taking the time to review the book, and my friendliest regards always.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
[September 1931]
Dear Dorothy;
My poor mother died on Monday the 31st. There was no boat out from here until Wednesday, so I could not even try to get to the services, which were held in Red Cloud on Thursday afternoon. My brother and sister left Pasadena with mother’s body Monday night and two other brothers joined them on the way home. For mother’s sake I am glad it is over—before her mind began to fail. The end was sudden—pneumonia. I shall stay on here through September and then I must go to my poor brother who has lived solely for his mother for three years and a half. I feel a good deal like a ghost myself, and I know it is much worse for him. Goodbye, I know you’ll be sorry, my dear. It seems strange to me that you and I are now the “older generation.” I never thought of that before.
Lovingly
Willa
In a review of Shadows on the Rock published in the September 1931 Forum, Granville Hicks attacked both it and Death Comes for the Archbishop as “diffuse” and said it revealed why Cather was a “minor” writer. Hicks ended, “To-day, perhaps even more than in the past, it takes stern stuff to make a novelist. Miss Cather, one is forced to conclude, has always been soft; and now she has abandoned herself to her softness.” Henry Goddard Leach was the editor of the Forum.
September 1 [1931]
Dear Mr. Leach;
The article about which I wrote you is not exactly a review of my new book, but a general estimate of all my books and of me. From the letters I have received about it, I gather that it is accepted as your opinion and the Forum’s opinion; Mr. Hicks is not mentioned. It is probably your policy to give your reviewers a free hand, but there are limits to all editorial policies. When I was editing McClures I would certainly not have allowed an article so generally derogatory to you to appear in the magazine. Had Mr. McClure and I both been abroad, the office staff would not have allowed an article so detrimental to an author for whom we had any regard to be printed, without first consulting us.
Granted that you felt the time had come to utter a few unpleasant truths, it is possible to say uncomplimentary things in a courteous and even a respectful way. But the tone of this article is sarcastic and contemptuous throughout, and no desk editor representing you in your absence would have printed such an article about any writer for whom you had much regard.
The Forum, I realize, has a right to put as low an estimate as you think just upon any writer’s abilities, but I question the editorial ethics of printing a statement like the following [magazine text is literally cut out and pasted on the letter]:
Like most of her books, it is elegiac, beguiling its readers with pictures of a life that has disappeared, and deliberately exploiting the remoteness of that life in order to cast a golden haze about it.
To “deliberately exploit” is certainly to use things or persons rather craftily for one’s own advantage. Those words have a bad history, and their connotation is worse than their literal meaning. You must know that I am not an opportunist or a trickster. If you wished to tell the public a few plain truths about me, you could surely have given the job to someone who was not malicious.
A good many reviewers do not like this book very well. Dr. Cross, who reviewed it for Mr. [Henry Seidel] Canby, is, I gather, somewhat disappointed in it. But he has enough scholarship and literary background to see just what I was trying to do, and he gives me credit for an honest effort even though he wishes I had done something else.
An article in this tone, appearing in a magazine of The Forum’s standing, does one harm, certainly, as it was intended to do. But I think the hurt it gives my feelings, coming from a publication with which I had always had most pleasant and friendly relations, far outweighs any other harm. This is the first letter of protest I have ever written an editor concerning a review, and I am very sad that it is to you I am addressing it.
Sincerely yours
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
September 3 [1931]
Dear Alfred;
With this letter I am sending Miss Aaron two short stories for the volume of which “Neighbor Rosicky” will make a third. I hope that you and Blanche will read them both before Miss Aaron starts out to sell them. “Old Mrs. Harris” is the more interesting, perhaps; but I think “Two Friends” is the best short story I have ever done. It’s a little like a picture by [Gustave] Courbet; has that queer romantic sort of realism. It is so ‘American’ of thirty years ago that when I look it over I quite forget who wrote it. When you do a thing that is so indigenous that the greatest foreign master couldn’t have done it, then, it seems to me, you bring home the bacon, even though it’s but a sketch—a painter’s subject done in a painter’s way.
“Mrs. Harris”, too, is very Western, and it’s much more of a story; but it’s the two “business men” I’m proud of.
I sent you a wire about the jacket for the fourth edition. I don’t want to play the Atlantic article too hard, and as the third edition jacket will be small type and close set, why not have the fourth made up of short extracts with more space? I wish you would send me a proof of that drawing of a black rock you said you might sometime use on a jacket. It rather struck me at the time, and I’d like to see it again.
I suppose that awful Good Housekeeping portrait is good publicity; it’s bringing in a flood of letters from the queerest kind of people, splashy ladies on Park Avenue and farmers’ wives in Minnesota, all equally unable to write an English sentence.
Speaking of reviews, the worst I ever got were for “Antonia”. I got them from a clipping bureau in those days, and read them. And in the whole United States there were just three enthusiastic ones; Fanny Butcher, Grant Overton in the Sun, and some Philadelphia paper. All the others said it wasn’t a good story and it wasn’t good English; it was a mass of notes to be read at a Grange meeting and not a book at all. “A Lost Lady” and “Youth and the Bright Medusa” were the only books that got good reviews. This time it’s only the New York notices that are spiteful (publicity apropos of degrees and such things always antagonizes a lot of journalists). The papers in the chain of cities across the country are all cordial and friendly, even if they don’t like this book as well as others.
With warmest regards to everyone in the office,
Willa Cather
Cather often remembered her reviews, especially of My Ántonia, as having been much worse than they really were.
TO MR. ALEXANDER STUART FRERE-REEVES, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD.
September 9 [1931]
Dear Mr. Frere-Reeves;
During the last four months, because of the illness and death of my mother, I have not attended to business correspondence. I tell you this not as an explanation of my decision regarding the English publication of “Shadows on the Rock”, but in apology for my discourtesy in not replying to your letters.
I have never had any fault to find with my treatment by the house of Heinemann in the past, and I have never bothered the house with letters urging them to push my books in England. I thought if the books were good the sale would in time take care of itself. But it seemed to me that with this book the time had come to push matters a little. I was disappointed in the terms offered by Heinemann, and the very small advance offered, 250 pounds, as against 750 offered by another publisher. That offer seemed to me to express very little confidence in the book.
The thing that most influenced me to let this book try its fortunes with another publisher was the note of irritation and extreme annoyance in Mr. Evans’ letter to Mr. Salzberg. I have never met Mr. Salzberg, but I cannot believe that Alfred Knopf would have a very unreasonable man for his English representative. When there is friction between two publishing houses, it is almost sure to make a certain amount of unpleasantness for the author whose interests depend on the co-operation of the two houses. I am very stupid in business matters, and a business transaction which would be very simple for most people causes me a great deal of worry and indecision. That is why, for years, I have let Alfred Knopf manage my business affairs for me, very largely. He did not, however, attempt to influence me in my decision regarding “Shadows on the Rock”. He merely put the correspondence before me. I felt that I would rather have the book go to a publisher who was eager to do his best with it than leave it with Heinemann, where the advance offer was not encouraging and where there seemed to be some antagonism toward me, or Knopf, or both.
As for a collected edition, if Mr. Evans had said he would attend to it in three years, or four years, that would have been definite enough for me, but he was unwilling to set any date.
I have none but the most friendly feelings for Heinemann, and admiration as well. I let this book go elsewhere not because of any dissatisfaction with our relations in the past, but because the terms offered for this particular book indicated that Mr. Evans thought less of its possibilities than I did. Perhaps I made a wrong decision, but, at any rate, I beg you to believe that there is nothing piqued or offended in my attitude, and that my feeling for the house as a great business and a friend to Letters is what it was when I expressed myself fully to you in New York last winter. I did not transfer my books to the Knopf English branch, you will remember, though it would have pleased Alfred, I think. I believed that the time would come when, without interference from me, you would find it advantageous to push my books a little more. With this last book, I thought that time had come. I may, of course, be mistaken. If you are in New York this winter I hope I may have an opportunity to see you.
Very sincerely yours
Willa Cather
P.S. Please excuse the rough form of this letter. I am off on this little island in the Bay of Fundy, without a secretary or typist, and I type very badly.
October 5, 1931
My dear Mr. Meromichey:
Thank you for your kind letter. To be quite frank with you, I always shrink a little from the idea of my books being read in schools. At least, I don’t like to feel that they are “assigned” to students as a part of the grind. If young people read me, I would like it to be because they want to—I would even like to be read on the sly. But this is not replying to your question. If one of my books has to be read year after year (as “Ivanhoe” was in the days when I went to school), I think that “Death Comes for the Archbishop” will stand the wear and tear better than the others, and perhaps “One of Ours” or “The Professor’s House” would be more interesting to the young people than any of the others. “The Professor’s House” and Tom Outland’s Story seem to be especially popular with German and Scandinavian school boys.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
October 14 [1931]
New York City
I was so glad to get your card from Aix-les-Bains. I was up on my Canadian island and glad of everything this summer, until my mother died suddenly in Pasadena, August 31st. Since then life has been a tough pull. A long illness does not prepare one for the end of it.
I’m just back in New York for a few weeks, and one thing you can do for me; which is to send me six copies of your review of my book, which certainly gave me a hand‑up when I needed it—made me feel that I had been able to transfer to you the unreasonable and unaccountable glow that all those little details of life in Quebec gave to me. It’s like a child’s feeling about Christmas—no reason for it, it merely happens to one.
Of course most of the reviewers have cursed and scorned me for what I didn’t write! No ‘drama’, nothing about Indian fights! As if one didn’t have a perfect right to love a cream pitcher (of the early Georgian period) better than the Empire State Building. As if one could choose what one would love, anyway, or how one should love it.–––But, as I told you, I did this one to keep me going, and I’m well satisfied if a few old friends like yourself get a little happiness out of it, as I did. I’m just back yesterday—haven’t seen Alfred Knopf yet, but he telephoned yesterday that it keeps on selling like anything, 92,000 actual shipments from the office, besides the two Book Clubs. I think that’s because he himself liked it, and he and all his staff have worked awfully hard for it. I am so glad you liked it. You’re so much like Miss Roullier [?] that I almost feel as if you were French.
Affectionately
Willa Cather
Despite harsh reviews by some of the younger critics—such as Granville Hicks—Shadows on the Rock was a top-selling novel, second only to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth in 1931.
October 22, 1931
My dear Mr. Bain:
I have just returned to New York for a few days and your kind letter has been brought to my attention. This, I think, is the second time you have written me, and if we are going to be correspondents, I must beg you to either drop my middle name or spell it correctly. It is not Siebert, but Sibert. (I haven’t used it myself for years.)
Yes, of course, most of the reviewers are indignant because I did not write a conventional historical novel with all the great characters up and doing, and behaving themselves in the traditional manner. This does not bother me in the least, and if it bothers the reviewers, I only wish they would write the kind of book they like about old Quebec. It is a subject open to all—has been standing there for three hundred years.
No, I am not a Catholic, and I do not think I shall become one. On the other hand, I do not regard the Roman Church merely as “artistic material”. If the external form and ceremonial of that Church happens to be more beautiful than that of other churches, it certainly corresponds to some beautiful vision within. It is sacred, if for no other reason than that is the faith that has been most loved by human creatures, and loved over the greatest stretch of centuries.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
While Shadows on the Rock was selling, Cather was thinking about her next book, Obscure Destinies, a collection of three stories. One of those stories, “Old Mrs. Harris,” was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal under the title “Three Women”; it appeared there serially starting with the September 1932 issue. The following letter seems to be a transcription made by Knopf staff.
TO MANLEY AARON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
October 27, 1931
My dear Miss Aaron,
I notice that in his very cordial letter Mr. [George Horace] Lorimer speaks of the story they have just bought for the Journal as “Old Miz Harris.” Please call his attention to the fact that this is a very small variation from my text but it is an important one. In the first place it sounds as though the story were a Southern dialect story, which it isn’t. In the second place it gives to anyone acquainted with the South a very wrong impression of the old lady’s social status. Poor mountain people would certainly call her “Miz” but her neighbors and people of her own station would always call her “Mrs.” and that is the designation of her respectable middle class position.
I hope of course, that the editors will be careful to see that there is no change in the text anywhere without my consent.
Yours sincerely,
[No signature present]
M. A. DeWolfe Howe, author and editor of Memories of a Hostess, wrote Cather in October of 1931 to ask if she might reconsider her earlier suggestion that he destroy the letters she wrote to Annie Adams Fields. The Fields materials in Howe’s possession were now to be obtained by the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, and he thought Cather might want to reconsider her previous position.
TO M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
November 11, 1931
My dear Mr. Howe:
Yes indeed, I beg you to destroy all my letters before you dispose of Mrs. Fields’ correspondence. There are very special reasons why I wish this to be done.
In the first place, those letters are entirely artificial and unrepresentative of me. Your feeling that they might be of some guidance to a future biographer is mistaken; they would only mislead him. Mrs. Fields was so new a type in my experience that I was never at ease in writing to her. I was always afraid of touching upon one of her prejudices, or in some way letting the noisy, modern world in upon her. So I always tried to write her long sentences that meant nothing. I remember perfectly well how I used to struggle to fill out a few pages and say nothing at all.
Of course, when I was with Mrs. Fields herself, I never felt any constraint; in fact, there were few people with whom one could be so unguarded. That was because she was the soloist and I the accompanist. How delightful it was to have her look up from the morning paper and ask gravely: “My dear, who is this Rex Beach, has he to do with letters?”
But there was none of this genuineness and spontaneous pleasure in my letters to Mrs. Fields. They were written from a sense of duty—just because she enjoyed opening the morning mail. So if you will just put them in the furnace, I shall be greatly obliged to you.
Always faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. It has just occurred to me that the most satisfactory arrangement would be to ask you to send the letters in question to me, at the Grosvenor Hotel, 35 Fifth Avenue, New York, where I shall be stopping for a week or ten days. I will glance at them, and if there are any that seem to be more than mere formal evasion, I will return them to you for your collection.
Though it is unknown how many letters Howe had, he did send them to Cather to look over, and four letters from Cather to Fields are now found in the collections of the Huntington Library.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
November 26 [1931]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
I’d be very pleased if you did get out a new edition [of Song of the Lark], with a new jacket minus the Breton picture. I’m just leaving for a family reunion in Red Cloud, and could not possibly write a preface now. I’ve thought a good deal about prefaces, Knopf suggested one for a certain book of his, and I’ve decided not to write any more prefaces at all. They stimulate a temporary interest and curiosity, but in the long run they are a mistake, for an author still living and still working. I shall leave various comments on some of my books, out of which you can make prefaces after my decease.
If the writers of various novels I like had written prefaces to them, it would rather spoil the books for me. I think even stupid people like to puzzle over a book. A slight element of mystery is a great asset. The explanation of the “Archbishop” which I wrote for The Commonweal has been much used and quoted; but it would be a great mistake to use it as a preface to the book. It is too much like selling my own goods. One has to follow one’s instinct in these matters, for that is the only guide one has. I know you will not misunderstand my refusal. I don’t mean to be disobliging, and I am glad to help my publishers in any way that seems to me the right way for me. I am sure, for instance, that the article I wrote for the Colophon [“My First Novels (There Were Two),” published in June 1931], which has been so much quoted, stimulated interest in “O Pioneers” and “Antonia”. Indirect methods are the best, I am sure.
I have not a copy of “The Song of the Lark” at hand, but I think of one change I beg you to make. Leave the dedication to Isabelle McClung, but please cut out the limping verse which follows it,—an idiotic attempt to immitate the metre of Walther’s ‘Prize Song’ [from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg].
Yes, the new book is doing wonderfully well. I really think the feeling in Knopf’s office had a lot to do with it. They were all keener about it than about any other book of mine, even the salesmen. Mr. Stimson thought better of it than I did, a good deal. I turned in the first two-thirds of the manuscript to him when the Knopfs were abroad. I was feeling rather low about it, and he gave me a tremendous hand-up. I could see at once that it was personal, not publishing, enthusiasm. He and his staff did a lot for it.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather