The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

TO CYRIL CLEMENS

January 30, 1937

Dear Mr. Clemens:

Are you sure it was in the Forum that you saw the article which you quote? I thought it was published in the Saturday Review, and it was written by the Prince of Prevaricators, Ford Maddox Ford.—Not a word of truth in it! I am sure that no group of ladies from Pittsburgh ever went to see Mr. Housman—and still more sure that I never headed such a group. When I met him it was not at his rooms in Cambridge, or in Cambridge at all. There was no golden wreath. It was simply an afternoon of conversation—conversation chiefly about other things than Mr. Housman’s verses.

I have been greatly annoyed by this matter, Mr. Clemens, and have been besieged by demands to ‘tell what I know about Housman’. In short, I am paying a heavy price for a very brief acquaintance. Alfred Knopf (who publishes More Poems) and I talked the matter over and he has suggested that at some time, probably in the distant future, I should write a very exact account of my afternoon with Housman, in much the same informal manner that I have used in the book of essays recently published under the title Not Under Forty. These essays are scrupulously truthful accounts of accidental meetings with very interesting people. This promise to Mr. Knopf will protect me from the almost threatening demands that have been made by a number of people. One’s memories, after all, are one’s own, and if one relates them to the public one prefers to do it in one’s own way.

When I last wrote you about this matter I had determined never to give out any account of my impressions of Mr. Housman. But since so many false stories (like the one you quote on your postcard) have been started, I shall probably some day, when I am not so busy as I am now, write a statement of the very brief and simple facts.

Sincerely yours,

Willa Cather

TO ZOLTAN ENGEL

February 20, 1937

My dear Mr. Engel:

Please accept my heartiest thanks for the beautiful medallion of Rudyard Kipling which you have been gracious enough to send me. I have seen few portrait medallions which seem to me so successful, and it will be a great addition to my collection.

You ask me whether I know of any colleges that would be grateful for a medallion of Kipling: I am afraid I do not. I am led to believe that just at present most colleges would be more interested in a portrait medallion of Mr. T. S. Eliot!

Thanking you again for your kindness, I remain

Cordially yours,

Willa Cather

TO META SCHAPER CATHER

February 20, 1937

Dear Meta:

Roscoe may still be in the far west, in which case I beg a favor of you. If a package or any letters, addressed to me, come to you from the enclosed address, please forward them to me. This George Seibel is a Pittsburgh editor, and is one of the most persistent and tormenting of all my many curses.

Hastily, but with love to you all,

Willa

TO GEORGE SEIBEL

February 22, 1937

My dear Mr. Seibel:

I am glad to say that I haven’t any New York address at present. I go to New York several times each year, but I stop at a different hotel every time. Just at present I am on my way to visit my brother in Wyoming. Anything you may wish to send me will eventually reach me if you will address it in care of—

Mr. R. C. Cather,

1225 N. Center Street,

Casper, Wyoming.

I am sorry to say that I have heard nothing of Francis Hill for many years.

I am delighted to hear that you and Mrs. Seibel are both well. As for me, I am well—whenever I am not in New York. The air there is so filled up with gasoline that a country bred person cannot get enough oxygen to breathe.

With best wishes always,

Willa Cather

TO BERNARD DEVOTO

March 10, 1937

Dear Mr. De Voto:

This letter is not for publication, and writing to editors is certainly not a habit of mine.

But I find that after several weeks have gone by I still feel a wish to thank you for your letter to Mr. Edmund Wilson, which appeared in the Review some time ago. I say thank you advisedly, because in that letter you stated clearly things that I have felt very strongly and have never been able to formulate, even to myself. One knows that our actual lives are very little made up of economic conditions. They affect us on the outside, but they certainly are not what life means to you or to me or to the taxi driver, or to the elevator boys and hall boys (all of whom I know very well) in the house where I live. Theories of economic reform and social reconstruction really seem to interest nobody very much—except the men who write about them and the men who have made it a profession to be interested in them. Most, if not all of these students who burn with zeal to reconstruct and improve human society, seem to lose touch with human beings and with the individual needs and desires which make people what they are.

You probably remember that as an empiricist Tolstoi went even further than you go in your letter to Mr. Wilson. After spending most of his life in pondering how to make life better for men of high and low estate, he decided that the European desire to organize society efficiently was a mistake. And he repeats down through the years that “the state of a man’s mind has always been more important to him than the conditions of his life. It seems as if there were some antithesis between efficient organization and the best there is in mankind; as though, in a highly organized, extremely efficient society, men cease to think truly or feel deeply.” Of course, Tolstoi tried to be a Marxist and failed; of course, he is very much out of date and out of fashion now, but certainly no one ever took the puzzle of human life more to heart or puzzled over it more agonizingly,—not even the New Republic.

It quite heartens one to have a man come out and say frankly, as you did, that it seems natural to regard the world immediately about one as made up of individuals rather than of “masses”: and that human history and human experience, and the human needs we know to be strongest in ourselves and in our friends, make the most reliable data we have as to what really comprises happiness and well-being in individuals and large collections of individuals.

Please excuse me if I seem to be trying to write your editorial back at you, for I know very well I could not improve upon it.

Very sincerely yours,

Willa Cather

TO E. K. BROWN

April 9, 1937

My dear Mr. Brown:

I recently returned from a long absence, and among the many reviews and articles awaiting me I find your interesting and very friendly pamphlet. You have certainly brought a friendly and unprejudiced mind to my books, and though I do not always agree with you I am interested in all your opinions.

I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live. The places in which he has lived do, to a certain extent, color his mind. But to me the Kipling of Captains Courageous is just as vigorous and keen and full of his subject, as the Kipling of the early Indian stories.

You say that the Southwest of the Archbishop is not so much my country as the West of Nebraska. I think in your zeal to make your case, you have fallen into error. I knew the Southwest early, and knew it long and well. I did not write about it earlier for one reason only: the Southwest is so essentially and at its roots a Catholic country, that it seemed to me no Protestant could handle material properly. (You understand that I am speaking here of the real Southwest, the Mexicans and the Indians and the workers on the railroads. I am not speaking of the tourists and cheap artists and dude ranches which have infested that country and overwhelmed it since I first knew it.)

To go back to the other side of my parenthesis, I waited fifteen years for some Roman Catholic to write a book about the real New Mexicans, their religion and country, and some of those early French missionary priests who left such a fragrant tradition of tolerance and insight and kindly sympathy. Isn’t it possible after all, that one may admire quite as sincerely a man of Father Latour’s type as a man of Father Vaillant’s? I am asking you to read a letter which I wrote concerning the actual writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. You will find it on this page in the pamphlet enclosed.

Very cordially yours,

Willa Cather

I must apologize for the enclosed pamphlet:—it is one my publisher uses as a reply to colleges and clubs who write to him for information.

Willa Cather

TO ZOË AKINS

April 19, 1937

My dear Zoë:

You will forgive me if I say [a] word in typewriter about Mr. [Daniel] Totheroh’s play, which I am sending back to you.

Take Mrs. Forrester’s first entrance in Act I. What does she say when she comes into the Judge’s office? My, your stairs are steep! That is what the scrub woman says when she arrives. Did you ever, Zoe, know a woman with any spunk or sparkle who used “my” as an exclamation? I remember a fat old Methodist neighbour who used to drag out “My, but the days are warm, Mr. Cather!” In her first sentence, Zoe, he shows her up for a common, dreary thing. In her next sentence, she refers to her (1) age and to her (2) travelled state! Two things she would never have done. (1. Her particular weakness, 2. Bad taste.)

A little later she trills to this lumping Swede that his little boy’s eyes are “blue as a mountain lake”. Ho-Ho! When she doesn’t talk like a corsetless old Methodist woman, she talks like a darling club woman, and says she “would die” to have such eyes etc. That expression stamps her socially. So does “you can help me out”. Everything she says stamps her socially, except when she brazenly quotes me. She says Niel will be “a great asset” to Sweet Water society. Lord, they needed assets—some future, with Marian as the social leader!

Everything that Niel says is the speech of a cotton-mouthed booby. As to Mrs. Forrester’s smirking about “drinking here alone, with two men”–––the dining-room girls in our little town-hotel might have said that; the commonest King’s Daughter or Eastern Star sister would have refused the sherry, or drunk it and said nothing. On this page, the playwright becomes unbearable because he makes the Judge bring out discreditable insinuations about Captain Forrester. The integrity of the book really rests on Captain Forrester.

My dear Zoë, I read no further than the first act. Nothing could induce me. The language he puts in Mrs. Forrester’s mouth shows that he hadn’t the least idea of the kind of woman she was. I snatched up the book, which I hadn’t read for years. I could find no excuse for him. As you know, Mrs. Forrester was done from life, an absolutely truthful portrait. Her speech was always a delight to me. She never said anything very wise, or even very witty, but her voice and eyes spoke together—it was quick spontaneous staccato, usually a little mocking. She never used bromidic expressions, such as “I hear Niel is back”, or “You can help me out.” One can’t judge what one writes I suppose, but if I let her down and made her talk like a common slut, may I suffer for it!

Zoë, I pray you turn to this page of Act I and see what that rather nice boys’ picnic becomes. Nothing great, those few pages, but something rather fresh and rather genuine about it. And this is what he does with that nice morning!

Now, my dear Zoë, I don’t care how many grand situations he may have built up in the acts I did not read, or how “dramatic” he may be, and I don’t care what might happen to the common woman that he has made of Mrs. Forrester. We’ll forget this episode forever, but I do want you to refer to the passages I have mentioned in the first act and judge as to whether you think I have been unreasonable.

I do thank you for the verses you sent me. Of course, I like the one about your own room very much the best—in fact, I like it very best. The one on Jobyna [Howland] I would like, if you hadn’t put her name under the title. I just, somehow, cannot in my mind connect Jobyna with the out-of-doors or the quiet things of nature. And yet, you know, I liked her very much.

Now that I’ve explained myself a little, my mind is clear of wrath against this young man. It’s the only quarrel [“quarrel” is crossed out] no, discord, that has jarred you and me in so many years—and I’ve been a goose to take it seriously. Forgive me.

With my love to you

Willa

TO ROSCOE CATHER

May 19 [1937]

Jaffrey, New Hampshire

My dear Brother:

I am not a good enough writer to tell you how much I appreciate your long confidential letter with its account of all you have been doing. You put the situation to me so clearly that I feel as if I had been through your adventures with you. I am so glad, oh so glad, that you and Meta are to be released at last from those long, hard Wyoming winters which you have borne so bravely: and that now you are to spend your time in that northern part of California, which to me is so much more beautiful than the southern part. Even though you should not make a great deal of money, it will be a grand move. What can money buy that is so worth while as beautiful country and the pleasant things of every-day life which so often go with beautiful country? Your picture of Colusa seems to me just the sort of town I would like myself. I like everything about northern California, except the fact that there are a great many idle, drifting, shallow people there. Just the kind of people among whom Jim’s wife [Ethel Garber Cather] cuts a simper in the South [of California]. But you and Meta will find your own kind of people, even in California.

I am so glad that you have had this wonderful visit with Douglass. I love to have you two men happy together. Yes, you are quite right; he has more of Father in him than any of us, and he has kept so remarkably young in face and feeling. (But wasn’t it funny that I was the only one who got Father’s hands? And the older I grow, the more they are like his.)

I must say again, dear boy, that nothing could please me more than to know that you and Meta are going to live in a mild climate, and that you are going to be near Douglass. And when I go out to stay with the Menuhins, I can come to visit you. Your town cannot be very far from Los Gatos.

With all my love to you,

Willie

[Written on the back:] I return to N. Y. a week from today.

TO ALFRED A. KNOPF

August 9 [1937]

Grand Manan Island

Dear Alfred;

My Herald-Tribunes come in bunches, and I don’t always open them at once. So for me, Pat was lost, found, returned, all in one bunch of news, like a “continued story”. I’m glad he is back again, but more glad that he ran away. I’m glad he wanted to run away. He has had too much petting, and it’s a good sign that he felt like kicking it all over. People are always (on your account and because you are a publisher) paying more attention to him than they naturally would to a lad of his age. Their overtures are more potent than your efforts to counteract them: (bad English, but you will understand.) All this wouldn’t matter if the boy were just a silly ass. But there is another side to him, and you’ll agree with me that the other side hasn’t had much chance. We all like flattery, and most young people like to stand out from the crowd and be exceptional. The son of a successful and prominent man always has a hard time. But the only son of a conspicuously original and successful publisher, in these times when every society girl and every school boy wants to “write”—well, he’s pretty nearly damned from childhood. I’ve sometimes wished you’d sent him to school in Switzerland, where his name would not suggest getting next to a publisher. I don’t think you can realize what a handicap “Alfred A. Knopf Inc.” is to him. We’d have to be of heroic [“heroic” is rewritten here three times] mould to stride over it. (I wrote Blanche several weeks ago about getting a black spider sting on my right hand—had a nasty time with it. Now I’m free of bandages, but my hand remains stiff and awkward, as you can see when I have to write the word “heroic” over three times to make it at all decipherable!) I hope you and Blanche didn’t worry too much about Pat’s running away.

My love to you both, and a great deal to Pat—though, I shan’t tell him so.

Devotedly to you all

W.S.C.

P.S. Just a word: why don’t you ask Greenslet to let you see the [crossout] (failed again!) prospectus they are preparing for the subscription edition? A rumor is going round that you have left me, or I have left you.

W.S.C.

TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER

Tuesday [August 1937?]

My Darling Twinnies;

Yesterday a wild north-easter—wish you could have seen it. Bitter cold, and breakers of black water pounding up on the Giants’ Graves under a very low black-gray sky. Today, fair and dreamy—all off on boat trips.

I finished the autographs on Friday morning and sent them over to Eastport by special messenger (Ralph!) on Saturday boat. He bore himself like a King’s messenger! Hadn’t been to Eastport for years. We left the box in back hall, he came for it at six a.m. bore it off without waking us. Took it on boat as personal baggage, got it through American customs, drove in a taxi to express office at the far end of Eastport, got it on the train for Boston. Such a proud man he was. Happy thought: if I take Ralph for my island secretary, then perhaps we may have Willie [Thomas] for gardener?

Willie went for Miss [Sarah] Jacobus to cut the alder thickets on the Dimple Downs with his double-edged ax. Ax rebounded from a dead alder and cut his knee to the bone. He walked home but was unable to work for some days—lost blood, of course, and such dirty clothes rubbing it as he walked home! Inflammation gone, however, and the wound has healed.

I was almost as much disappointed as you, my dears, about your being shut out of the comfortable Frontenac. I didn’t realize that after prohibition it would be crowded. I should have written the management two weeks before you went away, and demanded rooms as a personal favor. Ah, I wish you could see Quebec in Winter!

I am sending a very interesting book on G. Manan on to Colusa. My hand is still stiff, as you can see—autographing didn’t do it any good. I must get a note off to Stephen [Tennant] who cabled yesterday from Aix-les-Bains to know where I am and whether I am ill. So now I must stop this letter. Everyone misses you, my dear children, but no one misses you so much as I do.

Your very loving aunt.

P.S. Oh delight! Yesterday Miss Bonnell telephoned Gannet Light [Gannet Rock Lighthouse] keeper to ask if she might come to spend night first fair day. Keeper replied his wife away on visit for two weeks, and he was afraid Government Inspectors would not approve Bonnell’s visit! These are the actual facts. She had engaged motor boat.

TO ZOË AKINS

October 28 [1937?]

My Very Dear Zoë;

The book [The Hills Grow Smaller: Poems] came, some days after your letter. If the gracious inscription on the front page is true, I thank God for it—and your own generous mind. I read the book through in bed, after tea, which is an hour I save for things I really want to read. If I told you I liked it as much as I like your first book of verse written long ago, you’d know I was lying. For you yourself know it’s not so good. It’s not so singing. The lyric–––something isn’t here. Single lines don’t echo and stay in one’s mind just because they somehow had the rhythm one’s heart had then. You’ve gone and got thoughtful, as Edna Millay has! You’ve grown wiser in almost every way, my dear, but wisdom doesn’t seem to have much to do with Poetry.

Yes, you’ve grown wiser in every way except in the matter of self-protection. You will give the people who hate you a chance to vent their spite. I hope you won’t offer a new play in New York this season. Is there no place to put on plays except New York or some place where New York press men are taken thither by force? You’ll never get a fair showing from them—your plays are not the kind they like. You’re a romantic, and your hue is not the wear just now. The young men who “cover the theatre” have a grudge—and I’m afraid you have played into their hands a little. You have been indiscreet enough to write articles or letters to the paper explaining yourself—which always means defending oneself. The safe thing would be to present a hard and stony face to critics, not to take them into your confidence—and that is what you do when you reply to them. I, too, have my haters—they go for me every time they can; Messers [John] Chamberlain, [Lionel] Trilling, Kronborg [presumably Louis Kronenberger], Kaysmere [possibly Alfred Kazin?]—oh there are a lot of them. If ever I replied to them, or wrote articles setting forth my views and defending the kind of “art” I believe in, I think even Alfred Knopf would soon be trying to pass this brick along to another publisher, for he would come in for some of the ridicule. The nearest I have come to such a break was that article on Miss Jewett in Not Under Forty. It wasn’t a near break, (I may as well be truthful) it was a whole break. Nearly a hundred furious letters, and sly digs from the press generally, have shown me how foolish it is to make public a credo—one’s articles of faith ought to be the most protected of one’s secrets. Some of these horrid New York University graduates, all with foreign names and more foreign manners, had been publishing some of the most horrid articles about her and about “sex-starvation” in New England writers generally. Provincial ladies and lady-like men. It made me angry and I broke out. Silly performance. Now I have learned that if one is consistently silent where one’s own self is concerned, one must be silent when one’s friends are attacked. They reflect one’s point of view, one’s admirations—to speak for them is, in a manner, to speak for one’s self.

With you the case is more serious than with me. New York book reviewers have very little influence outside New York. Those in the “New Republic” and the “Nation” have, I suppose, but I really don’t care. The theatrical first night reviews are read everywhere by the small city Sunday editors and repeated—in print. I may be wrong, but I feel you ought not to bring out a new play here for a year or two. You don’t have to—so why not keep out from under the ax? Of course, if you show this letter to George [a mistake for Eugene?] O’Neill or any other theatrical persons, they’ll tell you it’s all nonsense. But they would be letting themselves off easy, and I am telling you an unpleasant truth—never an easy or pleasant thing to do. The New York theatrical writers have a grudge, have it in for you. Since you are certainly prosperous and don’t have to submit to punishment, why do you? A book, if it’s universally damned as the “Archbishop” was, can go quietly on and sell its five hundred thousand and keep selling. But a play can’t go quietly on by itself. There’s a big overhead. It can be kicked of[f] the stage and buried in a week—a night, for that matter.

My dear Zoë, I’ll put you on your honor to show this letter to no one. In preaching discretion to you, I’ve been indiscreet myself. I’ve been to honest because I want to save you pain, and because I feel it must be better for your reputation on the Pacific coast not to have these knocks coming back from New York. I’ve been thinking for a year about writing this letter. If a friend knows you’re up against a clique of prejudice and spite, it’s that friend’s business to tell you so, even if it is a mighty unpleasant job. As for the letter (now it’s written), read it, destroy it, forget it if it is painful. And let the next Willy-boy actor or Russian Prince you talk to persuade you that every play you write will have a fair greeting by the New York Press.

Now I’m tired, my dear, and must say goodnight.

Your True though Tactless friend

W.S.C.

TO ZOË AKINS

[Written in the top margin:] I remember your room at the Ritz was full of your own garden flowers

November 8 [1937]

Dearest Zoe;

The flowers reached me three days ago, and tonight they are as fresh as if they had just come out of your garden. And how did you know that I especially love the leaves and the balls of the eucalyptus tree? Do send me some of the balls or nutlets in late November. They keep fragrant all the winter through.

I hope these white flowers mean forgiveness, Zoë. I doubt if I had a right to write you as I did. Maybe you don’t mind being pummelled by a lot of New Deal boys who are out to knock you! Anyway, I mind it for you. Chiefly because it’s a frame-up, and I doubt if you could get a newspaper notice that was not a foregone conclusion.

I’m afraid my way of saying things is a little more crabbed than usual. I’m working on a new book [Sapphira and the Slave Girl] which is such a pleasure to me, and God and man seem agreed that I shan’t get ahead with it. Nothing is more disturbing to me than to work with Houghton Mifflin, and I have got into their net again with the subscription complete edition. Knopf has no subscription department, and he wanted me to do this—said it had to be. It’s given me the Hell of a spring and summer, and now it’s breaking into my winter and my new book. I don’t want anything but quiet and a fairly pleasant place to write in, and to be let alone. Do you think I can get it? I’d be glad to live on a crust if I could get just that. I can’t!! Now the Goddam movies are after “Antonia”. I’m in terror for fear Houghton Mifflin may sell me out; they can, you know. Isn’t it hard luck!

Lovingly

TO ELSIE CATHER

December 22 [1937]

My Precious Sister;

How kind you were to write me a lovely long letter and tell me all about the ceremony for the windows, and about the old folks at home! I don’t deserve it. But this year I tried to send cards to every one of mother’s old friends, and all those of “our crowd” at home. I did forget Mrs. Warren, but I sent one with a little note to dear Mrs. Macfarland in California.

Life has been crowded, for the Menuhins arrived only a few days before Douglass came, the mother very ill and forbidden to leave her bed, and I tried to be with the little girls (who are no longer little, but as lovely and loving as ever) until Yehudi and his father arrived from New Orleans and other Southern engagements. But I arranged so that I could be with Douglass as much as if I had no other ties, and he went to Yehudi’s first concert here—I gave him my seat, and I sat in the Menuhin’s box. I am sure he enjoyed the splendor of Carnegie Hall and the almost theatrical welcome and triumph New York gave Yehudi.

Douglass was here for my birthday dinner—poor M.V. had to work at the Library that night and could not come, and I wouldn’t ask anyone not “family”, so he and Edith and I had a wonderful evening to ourselves.

I don’t know if you know that he came on largely to see a doctor. The best heart specialist in New York pronounced his heart absolutely all right. What a relief that was to both of us. The pain in his left arm comes from some form of neuritis. Please dear use this little check for something jolly.

A merry Christmas to you, dear.

Willie

TO FERRIS GREENSLET

January [really December?] 29, 1937

New York City

My dear Ferris Greenslet:

Thank you for your letter bearing good wishes, and may I send you all possible good wishes for the coming year?

I have been a long time in replying to your letter of December 4th. I have thought your proposition over carefully and I am still, as I was when I first read your letter, strongly against any plan to make an illustrated edition of Antonia for next year, or for any other year.

Certainly, I like Grant Wood’s work, but his whole view of the West, and his experience of it, is very different from my own. Our geographical background was different. Iowa is a black-loam and heavy-clay state: too much rain and plenty of mud. In Central and Western Nebraska the soil is sandy and light, not nearly so productive as in Iowa,—that is why the farms were so much further apart. Settlers in Nebraska were seventy per cent from overseas. Foreign population in Iowa was much smaller—though there were a good many Czechs there.

Why can’t we let Antonia alone? She has gone her own way quietly and with some dignity, and neither you nor I have reason to complain of her behavior. She wasn’t played up in the first place, and surely a coming-out party, after twenty years, would be a little funny. I think it would be all wrong to dress her up and push her. We have saved her from text books, from dismemberment, from omnibuses, and now let us save her from colored illustrations. I like her just as she is.

I would, of course, be pleased if I could feel sure that the Benda illustrations will never be ripped out again, and I would be greatly gratified if one of the excellent proof-readers at the Riverside Press would run through the book and mark the broken letters and illegible words which should be replaced. In case you should ever decide to reset the book, I beg you to use just the same type and the same slightly tinted paper now used.

By the way, I think very well of a book you have recently published, but I would not dare tell you which, lest one of your enterprising young men should manage to work my name into an advertisement.

Faithfully yours,

Willa Cather

TO SINCLAIR LEWIS

January 14, 1938

New York City

My dear Lewis:

I have had a grand time reading The Prodigal Parents—all through it I had the sense of coming home again to my own people. Even the sawdust son and the detestable Sara are unmistakably American—couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Maybe it’s the fact that they are so easily taken-in that makes them seem so much our own kin. With a world-wide reputation for being smart and on-the-make, aren’t we just about the most gullible and easily taken-in of all peoples? It’s our incurable optimism and sweet trustfulness that have got us into all this mess. When this country is chock-full of solid people who always come up to the scratch without any rhetoric, like Fredk. Wm. and Hazel [Cornplow, characters in Lewis’s novel], will you tell me why we lie down and take a booting? I half believe that it’s because we can’t seriously believe evil of anyone. We don’t like to believe evil. It’s more comfortable not to believe it. We think that Stalin must have very good points, and we know Mussolini has made Italy so comfortable for tourists. I don’t believe we’ll waken up to the situation we’ve drifted into until the knife is at our throat. There are Howard Cornplows in every country, but I think in other countries they have more meanness and sharper claws than this poor dub. The reason I so enjoyed this book is, that it fairly glows with that peculiar and generally misplaced and unintelligent kindness which is so peculiarly American. (For a hundred years we have been begging all the crooks and incompetents in the world to come over to us and be happy. Well, we’ve got them). What is worse is that we’ve got their grandsons, and with the right kind of political manipulation they’ll do us all in very nicely. Anyhow, I’d rather live and die in such a silly soft-hearted country than in any other. Wouldn’t you? All the same we are in a tight fix just now, though not many of the people you meet on your lecture tour will realize it. They will tell you that “things will come out all right”, just because they always have.

Please come and have tea with me when you get back.

Your obliged

Willa Cather

TO YEHUDI MENUHIN

January 22 [1938]

My Dear Yehudi;

It is impossible to get these letters here in German. Travellers cannot carry big books about, so I send this tiny little one, which contains all the preserved letters of a young man who died at thirty-one [Franz Schubert]. They are rather heart-breaking, these letters, when one thinks of all that lay behind them. (I like to think that if you had been living in his time you would have seen what the others did not see, and would have helped him.) But put all the hardships and disappointments together in one heap, and match against it all the lovely things he made in fifteen years,—can one then say that he had an unhappy life? Being hungry wouldn’t matter much if one’s mind were blooming every day like that, would it?

Happy Birthday, dear and noble artist. God send you many years of achievement and happiness.

Your loving and grateful

Aunt Willa

TO FERRIS GREENSLET

January 24, 1938

My dear Ferris Greenslet:

I am going to ask a favor of you and I have put it off a long time. Under another cover I am sending you a book of drawings by young Stephen Tennant, the fourth son of Baron Glenconner. Anne Douglas Sedgwick wrote to me some twelve years ago and asked if she might give this boy permission to write to me. Since then Stephen and I have been good friends, and two years ago he spent the winter at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey and gained thirty pounds. (I sent him there for a three weeks’ stay, to recover from a cold he caught on landing. He stayed there the winter, all alone with his valet.) He is a very handsome fellow, with great talent, but very frail health. I enclose with this letter two of the notices which greeted his book in England. The review by Connolly is really very discerning.

Of course, since the book has attracted attention in England and has delighted Margot Asquith, Stephen’s publishers do not see why they should not be able to export a few hundred sheets to the States. I promised Stephen that I would present his book for the consideration of the only two publishers with whom I have direct relations. I made this promise before I saw the book! He warned me that the tone was ribald. But when it arrived I saw at once that it wasn’t the kind of ribaldness that goes in America (I think myself that these sketches, done in 1929, were a natural reaction of the young man’s upbringing, which was very puritanical). Viscount Grey was a firm stepfather and his feeling about “Nature” was certainly very different from young Tennant’s; I should liked to have heard their breakfast table conversation.

You will enjoy looking through this book,—the drawings are really remarkable, you know. All I beg of you is to write me a personal letter, telling me how the book strikes you and giving me a few words of explanation as to why it would be rather impossible for an American publisher to handle this book. (Of course, if you know of any publisher who would be able to use imported sheets, I would be delighted to send the book to him.) It is difficult to explain to Stephen why, when we are so indecent in some things, we draw the line at others: certainly we simply won’t stand for any “lyrical beauty”, as Mr. Connolly calls it. We want Hemingway and words of four letters, without any perfume.

I hate to bother you about this, but you see I promised the young man (he is twenty-nine, but he seems about nineteen) that I would show you and Alfred his book, and I have to keep my word. Alfred wrote me a nice letter to send him and I don’t feel that I am imposing on you greatly when I ask you for one, because I think you will really enjoy running through the book some evening. Please return the two press cuttings and mail the volume back to me when you have looked it over.

Faithfully yours,

W.S.C.

On second thought I decide to enclose a letter in which Stephen comments on, and explains, the book himself. Please return it to me. All his letters are illustrated like this—he does them at top speed—in a few minutes.

TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER

January 24, 1938

My darling T winnies:

I must tell you how splendidly the moving pictures that Edith took at Grand Manan came out. We have no projector, but we took Hephzibah and Yaltah Menuhin into a kodak shop and had them run off. They were perfectly splendid of you, and even of me! And the woods and water were grand. Yehudi was away on tour, but he wants to see them before he sails, because the girls gave him such a good account of them. If there is such a thing as a good projector in Colusa, we will mail the films to you sometime and then you can show your father and mother just what Grand Manan is like.

The champagne that I like best is Louis Roederer and 1929 is a grand year, also 1926 is very fine. I am having a busy life these days, for when Yehudi is in town the girls and I usually walk with him, and when he is away on tour we walk without him, and also go to the art galleries. Last Thursday night we had a grand Opera party; Yehudi took his two sisters, Edith and me to hear Lohengrin. On January 29th we have another opera party to hear Tristan and Isolde. [Written in the margin next to above paragraph:] If you listen in on Saturday you can here it too! Afternoon performance will be evening with you, will it not?

Anything about my doings with the Menuhins is confidential, my dears, I know you understand that. People are always trying to make themselves important by using their name. I think you know that it is because they are such beautiful and good human beings that I love them, and not because they are “celebrities.” Yehudi hap pens to be the kindest and noblest human being I have ever happened to know at close range, and to me his nature is more interesting and beautiful than his talent. Of course, I am forced to believe that in his case a great talent and a lofty nature are one; neither could exist without the other. We had a wonderful walk round the reservoir one day last week when the thermometer was only eight above zero and the wind very keen. After an hour and a half out there we were so warm and jolly that we none of us wanted to go in, and were late for lunch.

Your tactful Aunt Jessie tried to crowd herself in on the Menuhins when they were in Los Angeles. She wrote the father [Moshe Menuhin] a letter that she must see him in order to send a message to me (ME!) since he was going to New York!!! Little did the lady know that I had many times warned both the mother and father that they must never receive any relative of mine whom I had not asked them to receive. I am not going to have this family tormented simply because they have been nice to me. It is a measure of Aunt Jessie’s intelligence that she could think she might put such a dodge through.

Now my dears, forgive me for getting in a temper about Aunt Jessie. Good-by and heaps of love to you all.

Your devoted

Aunt Willie

[Enclosed and written on a page from Book Week for January 8, 1938, with a column by Sinclair Lewis praising Cather’s work:] I’ve never met Lewis but twice, yet he’s always doing these “big brother” acts for me. Nice and friendly of him.

TO HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

March 2, 1938

My dear Mr. Canby:

I am just back in town after a long absence, and hasten to reply to your letter. Of course, you have my permission to keep my name in the P.E.N. Club through 1939, if it will oblige you. I warn you, I shall be on the other side of the world in 1939, and as for the “distinguished group” which you propose to bring over, I had rather they stayed at home and wrote something interesting! I do not believe you could look me in the eye and tell me that you think all this getting together and talking with the mouth, has anything but a bad effect on writers. I wonder, indeed, whether it has anything but a bad effect on human beings in general? I wish the Tower of Babel would happen all over again.

Now, another thing: I want to thank you for your review of Katharine Anthony’s book on Miss Alcott [titled Louisa May Alcott]. I see the Freud fanatics are getting on your nerves, as they are on mine. It happened that my old friend Mrs. James T. Fields, born a May, was a cousin of Louisa May Alcott. Several years before she died, Mrs. Fields asked me to destroy a great number of more-or-less family letters, which she did not wish to leave among her drawers-full of correspondence. There were a great many from Miss Alcott, who used often to come for long New England visits at her cousin’s house. Anything more lively and “pleasant” and matronly you could not imagine. She was often a good deal fussed about money, because, apparently, she was practically the only earning member of the family. You know the tone and conversation of the warm-hearted distinctly “pleasant” New England woman. The later letters showed her warm pleasure in “getting on” with her work and earning money that was so much needed. If the “naked bodies” of the men she nursed in her hospital experience left any “wound”, it was certainly not perceptible to her relatives, or in her letters—or in her very jolly books, as I remember them. Catherine the Great might be called fair game for Miss Anthony’s obsession, but certainly that warm-hearted and very practical New England spinster was not. I wish now that those letters to Mrs. Fields had not been destroyed. All these remarks, of course, are entirely confidential and are meant for you and Mrs. [Marion] Canby alone, but the tone of your review is so right that I want to add my hearty word of confirmation.

I am going to write to Mrs. Canby very soon, and I hope that we three can get together again before this almost-gone winter is over.

With my warmest greetings to you both,

Willa Cather

TO ROSCOE CATHER

March 26 [1938]

My Dear Boy;

Oh, they are all headed for matrimony, I can see it! You and Meta had better adopt me, I wont go back on you.

Please take your motor trip. Go to Tuscon, and go out to the very old mission of St. Xavier del Bac, go again and again. It’s about the loveliest thing on this side of the Atlantic. It’s Franciscan—read up a little on St. Francis. Everything about the place is lovely

I’ll write you about the Lake Placid plan later. Edith Lewis is a Delta Gamma, and greets her “sister in the Bonds”

Hastily

TO ALFRED A. KNOPF

April 19, 1938

My dear Alfred:

You will see by reading the enclosed letters from Madame [Marguerite] Yourcenar (the first written before she came to see me, the second afterward), that our interview greatly cooled her enthusiasm.

1. Unfortunately, Madame Yourcenar made her translation from the Tauchnitz edition [in English, though published in Germany], which contains many errors. She was no farther away than New Haven; had she applied to either you or me, a recent and corrected edition would have been sent her promptly.

2. Madame Yourcenar has never been in the Southwest at all, and seems to have no conception of how very different that country is from any other part of the United States. She has not informed herself about its people or customs—which, after all, are today very much as they were in Archbishop Lamy’s time. In so far as that country and people are concerned, her mind is an utter blank. Yet she says that there are some descriptive passages in the book (I don’t know how many) which she must “paraphrase.” How can one paraphrase descriptions of a landscape which one has never seen, or even informed oneself about? You will notice she speaks of these passages as descriptions of “American landscape”; as you know, it is Mexican landscape, not “American”.

3. Madame Yourcenar further told me that it would be impossible to use in her translation the local names of things—i.e., nouns such as burro, mesa, adobe (both a noun and adjective), casa, arroyo, hacienda, etc., etc. These words were, of course, originally Spanish, but they are now common words everywhere in the southwest. All the American farmers and railroad workmen use them without knowing that they are Spanish. There are simply no other names for these things. You cannot call an arroyo a ditch or a ravine.

4. I had of course thought that Madame Yourcenar would do what all the other translators of this book have done—simply employ these native words as they are used in my text. She declared that this was impossible, as the use of foreign words was very objectionable to the French taste and, moreover, they would not be understood by French readers. Explanatory footnotes, she said, were very objectionable to a French audience, and in such bad taste that she could not use them. I reminded her that the pages of Carmen [by Prosper Mérimée] are peppered with Spanish words, and whole sentences in the Gypsy language which are translated in footnotes. This is equally true of Colomba [also by Mérimée]. She said this would merely make a book look old fashioned, and with great decision dismissed the suggestion. She consented to use the word pueblo in her translation, but would promise nothing further.

5. Since my meeting with Madame Yourcenar I have been running through the very excellent Italian translation made by Alessandra Scalero, and I find that in every instance she uses the New Mexican nouns and adjectives, those I have listed above in paragraph 3 and many others, exactly as I used them myself. The only difference being that she puts all these foreign words, even such simple ones as “poker,” “rancheros” and “hacienda”, in italic. She has very clear and enlightening footnotes on such words as “trapper,” “gringo,” and very short footnotes telling clearly what a “mesa” is, a “hogan,” “wampum,” etc. The Italian translation clearly and faithfully reproduces the English text of the book.

6. Now we will get to the heart of the matter. Madama Yourcenar feels that this book accurately translated would not make, as she says, “beautiful French”. I have every admiration for the writer who wishes to write his own language beautifully, and I am afraid she has chosen a book which is not suited to the kind of French she wishes to write. My apprehensions have to do with:

First, her absolute refusal to make use of the local New Mexican-Spanish words for which there are no English or French equivalents.

Second, the fact that she wishes to paraphrase the passages describing a country which she has never seen and about which she has read very little.

Paraphrasing in this case would certainly be improvising. And how many improvisions, one would like to know? Madama Yourcenar told me that some of these words were “not in the dictionary”. I find very clear definitions of the several she mentioned in the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary, published 1935.

After going through the Italian translation and seeing how possible it is to make a faithful translation, I think it is not unreasonable in me to ask that I should be allowed to see proofs of Madama Yourcenar’s translation before it is published.

Excuse this long letter.

Faithfully yours,

Willa Cather

TO ELSIE CATHER

June 21, 1938

My darling Sister:

There is nothing I can say—nothing I can say at all. When Edith told me she had bad news for me, I thought of almost every one in the family—except Douglass. Nothing in my life has ever hit me so hard. Father’s death and Mother’s seemed natural. They had lived out their lives, but this seems unnatural altogether, and I cannot get used to it or feel reconciled to it. Anyone so full of the joy of life, and so full of energy and hope—no, I can’t seem to accept it at all. A good deal of the time I cannot believe it’s true.

One thing I do feel humbly grateful for, that it was so quick, that he died without the consciousness of dying.

I hoped that you would not undertake the long journey to California, that you would feel reconciled to remember him as you saw him last, but I did not write or wire you because I think in such matters one has to decide for oneself.

I was grateful to Roscoe for letting me know the hour of the service. Since it took place at two o’clock there, it was six o’clock here. I wanted to spend that hour in a church, but was unable to find any Episcopalian Church which would be open at that hour. They close at six. So I went to the Church of the Dominican Fathers, which is only a few blocks from this house and where I have quite often gone for service. The Catholics seem to be the only people who realize that in this world grief goes on all night, as well as all day, and they have a place for it to hide away and be quiet.

Now, my dear, for your sake and for mine, do not try to write me about your trip out there or about the services, or very much about the family meeting. It would be too hard on you to write, and on me to read. We are, both of us, so deeply torn and moved by such things, and I do not want to ask you to go through the ordeal of writing to me. It will only make the wound bleed again—I mean bleed afresh. It will always be there for both of us, that wound. Nothing that has ever happened to me has hurt me or discouraged me like this.

Willie

TO ROSCOE CATHER

June 29, 1938

My dear Roscoe:

I can be of little help to you, but I think there are some things which I should confide to you.

1. I am enclosing a letter from Mary Virginia [Auld Mellen]. Please read marked passage. Neither Edith nor I can remember that Douglass said anything about a will on that occasion. The three of us were laughing and talking here together, and it is very possible that he may have said something that neither Edith nor I caught. Mary Virginia must have heard him make some such statement—she would not lie, but neither Edith nor I heard it. He might have said some such thing merely as a figure of speech—to illustrate the fact that he had been really worried. But in quoting a man who can no longer speak for himself, I must state exactly what I remember hearing him say and what I do not remember.

2. Douglass asked me to go down with him to Tiffany’s to select a present for Miss Rogers—he had already been there himself. He took me to a show case full of bracelets, but they all happened to be extraordinarily ugly. There really was not a very pretty bracelet in the place. I noticed, however, a case full of really beautiful rings—not the awfully expensive kind—prettily blended stones and lovely settings. I said quite innocently, “Why not get a ring?”—I really was not pumping him; I am a poor detective. But he shut one eye and screwed up his face a little and said, “No, no, that’s a little too, too pointed.” I laughed and said, “Oh, you mean decisive.” “That’s it,” he replied, and I laughed and said, “same old fox”, which seemed rather to please him. For the two summers when I saw a good deal of Miss Rogers at the sanitarium, I honestly saw nothing objectionable about her. She was competent at her job, not stupid, had good manners and was more attractive than Douglass’ other girls. (Wait till you see the Edith to whom he made a bequest!) Douglass was rushing Miss Rogers pretty hard, and she admired him very much. His lovely way with his mother was enough to win any woman’s heart. He told me, when he said good-bye to me the spring before Mother died, that he thought he might marry Miss Rogers, and I told him I could see nothing against it.

Now, six or seven years of courtship is pretty hard on any young woman who has to make her own living. I think she lost her position at Las Encinas because there was “talk”, owing to Douglass. When I knew her I certainly believe that she was no “gold digger”, but she was like any other girl who has found the man she wants (I should say loves, not “wants”) and tries to make him believe she can make him happy. In the six or seven years which have elapsed since I first knew her and used to take long trips with the two of them, she may have deteriorated very much. That constant demand for sympathy and affection-which-gets-nowhere, is very hard on a young woman. Her position now is certainly much worse in every way than when she first knew Douglass. She has lost several positions, has been “talked about”, has passed from the twenties into the thirties, which is against her professionally and matrimonially. I hope he was very generous to her during his lifetime, for the bequest in his will seems to me insufficient recognition. During the years when Jessica and Elsie were giving him lots of perplexity (these seem to be the two persons most offended), Miss Rogers was giving him the kind of companionship and sympathy he liked. If Douglass was very generous to her, I am glad. She did more than any of us to make him comfortable. I think we ought to look at the matter as human beings. How would you like one of your daughters to be played with like that, always expecting to be married next year? I am enclosing a letter from Elsie which needs no comment. When I knew Miss Rogers, she was a nice, straight girl, and she believed altogether in Douglass’ affection—which was undoubtedly real affection,—though it led nowhere for her.

3. Now there is something I hate to tell you, and yet I feel I ought to. In every letter that Jim has written me since he left Kearney and joined Douglass, there has been a strong taint of disloyalty—except in the last letter, written after Douglass was dead. At first and for years after, he was always complaining that Douglass had given him a few hundred dollars to throw sand in his eyes and cheat him out of his share of FATHER’S ESTATE—which he seemed to think very large indeed! I wrote trying to reassure him, telling him I would give Douglass the management of my own savings at any moment. Secondly, all his later letters—there were not many, he wrote about twice a year—were full of complaints of his being held down and made a mere hired man, when he knew as much about the oil business as anybody. He said repeatedly that the oil business required no knowledge, no intelligence of any kind. It was pure luck, and he intended to play around with the little fellows, the under-dogs who had not had the luck of Douglass and his partners.

I know, Roscoe, these letters from Jim would have great influence with you if I had only saved them, but that little taint of ingratitude and disloyalty was like an ugly smell to me. I would keep the letters for a few days, try to answer them, then tear them up. There are many good qualities about Jim. When I am with him, I always feel a peculiar and special tenderness for him. But he tremendously overrates his own ability, and he is continuously nagged on by a wife [Ethel Garber Cather] who is full of petty ambitions, and who has developed a much more venomous nature than ever her old mother had. Ethel was patient with Jim for a long time, I know; but when she turned, she turned not to vinegar but to hydrochloric acid. I am not judging her, but it is up to you, your father’s son, to see that these furious and self-seeking women do not attack Miss Rogers tooth and nail and do her more harm than our family has already done her. Father would not have dealt fiercely with her. If she has another will tucked away somewhere, properly executed, as an honorable man you will have to see justice done. I am almost sure she hasn’t. Elsie’s hypothesis, that she encouraged him to drink these last five or six months, is so absurd. We know now that he knew he had a bad heart and the game might be up any time. One sort of man would lie in bed and read and eat toast. He wasn’t that sort. When he had drunk a few cocktails or a bottle of champagne, that dark shadow withdrew to a distance—did not seem so close, and he could talk to Miss Rogers about his rosy plans for the future and how he meant to go abroad on the Queen Mary. I think it was to get rid of that fear that he has been using himself up for the last year or so.

4. Now Roscoe, usually I keep peoples’ secrets, especially when they are secrets I am ashamed to read. But I think you ought to know how vacillating and unappreciative of favors and how weak Jim is—under his queer kind of conceit. I hope you will not try to give either him or Jack much authority, but will trust rather to the experience and to the possible, even probable, integrity of Douglass’ partners—whom he trusted so much. Jack is a dear fellow but—feels no responsibility, happy-go-lucky. You can’t make men over after they are thirty-five. Don’t put Jim up against any important men—Roy Oatman, Russell Amack, etc., etc. were always his kind. I know Doug’s partners are not exactly Harvard men, but they know their business, have proved it. Jim says there is nothing whatever about the business to know.

This is the last letter I shall write you on this subject. As soon as I am well enough, I will get off to Grand Manan, where I have no typewriter and nobody who can take dictation from me. But when you talk about “developing” Jim and Jack, I think I ought to ask you to sit down and consider awhile, and I feel that I ought to give you this important sidelight on Jim; that he is not loyal, and never while Douglass was living did he write a nice letter about him—only fault finding and distrustful ones.

Jim is sweet with his children, poor lad, but I don’t believe he is much fonder of them than Douglass was. Doug’s face used to glow and his voice was just full of feeling whenever he spoke of those children.

When I knew her Miss Rogers was not looking about for a man—most of the young men at the sanitorium disliked her. She was extremely good at her job, and wanted to make a real career of it. When I went off on a three day trip down to Caliente she never said or did anything that made me feel that she was a cheap sort. She was then a frank, fresh, rather intelligent Western girl; I never saw her throw a soft look at Douglass, or hold his hand in the car, or languish. She behaved like a well brought up girl. I am (oh this pen!) I am sorry if her life has been spoiled. Deal in this case as Father would have done.

Lovingly

Willie

Destroy Elsie’s letter after you have read it

TO MARGARET CATHER

[Postmarked July 13, 1938]

Admiral Beatty Hotel, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada

My Darling Margaret;

We are here in this old town again—great showers of rain and bitter cold. We left New York in intense heat, both of us exhausted by packing. Here we will shop a little and rest in bed a great deal. So many hard and sad things have come down on me in the last six weeks that I am rather a wreck. I didn’t quite know whether I could take the noon train for Boston on Sunday. Just as I was putting on my hat to take the cab, a box of great gardenias dropped down into my lap—sent by Yehudi’s darling little new wife [Nola Nicholas Menuhin] with such a tender message. Somehow it did hearten me. I can’t feel utterly knocked out so long as the young love me. Nola is just the right wife for my boy,—and just the kind no one would ever have selected for him. I am hard to please, and I was very jealous for Yehudi. I might have thought she wasn’t brilliant or picturesque enough for him. But he sees the souls of people—that is his peculiar gift. She is the right one.

Dear child, I was and am so glad your kind mother thought of giving me a little place in the service for Douglass by having that first dedication read. It would never have been taken out if it hadn’t been such very weak verse. But I’m glad I wrote it and felt it, if it is poor verse, and glad that we three loved each other so dearly in our youth and always, though it breaks my heart now, and it seems to me that I never can care very much about living again.

Give a warm and loving greeting to Elizabeth when you write

Lovingly

TO ROSCOE CATHER

[Probably September 1938]

Grand Manan Island

My Dearest Brother;

Your long letter from the clinic brought me great peace of mind; first, because it gave good report of your physical state, secondly because you confessed a weakness, and that enables me to confess mine. The reason I have not written you oftener is that after I write a letter to any of the family, I lie awake all night, and all my past failings and failures go through my head like a horrible cinema film: Why did I not do more for mother and father when they were living? Why did I give up one evening of Douglass’ short stay in New York to an English publisher, and send Doug to a show alone? My life seems to have been made up of mistakes of this kind. And yet, I have never been “ambitious”. I drove ahead so hard because I wanted never, never to come back on Father for anything, nor to ask any of my family to put up a dollar to back a game they didn’t understand. But in doing that, I let a good deal of life slip by. I was at home on three different summers when Jim was coercing, tormenting father to “set him up in a business”. Father used to hide in the bath room for hours. I got a great disgust for that form of parent-torture. Perhaps in trying so hard to be quit and clean of that sort of wheedling, I neglected some things that mattered more.

You ask for a report of health. Better than when I left town. Then I had not been sleeping without med[i]cine for sometime, and had a very unpleasant trembling of the hands. All nerve reactions were bad, and, funniest of all, my hair was coming out in great bunches—it seems that sometimes results from nervous disorders.

I am much better now, of course. My hands are steady again, I sleep fairly well, but I am not very happy.

[This paragraph marked in margin: “copy for Elsie”] It seems strange that Alfred Knopf, who has been always such a dear and loyal friend to me, in music and in art, not to speak of our happy business relation, should turn up with the only recent picture I have of Douglass. One day when I took Douglass into his office, Alfred snapped him with his little Leica camera, invisible and soundless. Douglass never knew he was snapped, and I didn’t know it. They were not very good, so Alfred didn’t offer them until after Douglass’ death.

Please send on[e] of the prints I enclose to Elsie, with a Copy of this explanation. Keep one for yourself, and give one to Jack and one to Jim; to no one else.

Elsie says you have Douglass’ copies of my books. You may give one to Jack and one to Jim, but see that they are copies which are clearly inscribed to Douglass. Even so, they may be used for club purposes by the women. All the other copies you will please take to your own home.

Tell my darling little Margaret that I am very happy that she is happy, and that every one of our lovely places on this island make me think of her. Last summer I had five gay companion[s] who made me love life; the twins for summer, and the Menuhins for winter. Within six months they have all married. Just now I must try to work a little every day on the book I began in the last autumn. It’s lost its pep, but it is the only thing that will bring me back to myself; regular work hours, I mean. Alfred and Dr. Garbat agree on that. Letter writing disintegrates me. Margaret will get a little wedding present some day.

I shall not be here after September 15th, but I don’t yet know just where I shall be.

This is the old typewriter Doug bought for me from the busted gambler in Cheyenne thirty year[s] ago, when we three were there together. It has lain up here in the damp sea air for six years, so please excuse mistakes. Ralph [Beal] has tried to mend it with automobile tools.

Very lovingly to you all

Willie

TO EDITH MCCLUNG

September 26, 1938

My dear Edith:

I do not wonder that you are feeling anxious about Isabelle’s situation in Italy, but in so far as I can tell, Mussolini’s aim in expelling a great number of Jews from Italy is to give more jobs to the native Italians. His action seems to arise from the unemployment situation, rather than from personal hatred as it unquestionably does with Hitler. As Jan is not engaged in any business which would take a job away from an Italian, I think there is a very good chance that he will not be troubled. I understand that Jewish tourists are admitted to Italy and courteously treated. Mrs. [Elizabeth Moorhead] Vermorcken of Pittsburgh has lately gone over to Italy, and is at the present time at the Hotel Cocumella. If she saw anything threatening, I think she would write or cable me.

I got back from Canada, where I have been all summer, only the day before yesterday, and found a short letter from Isabelle awaiting me here. She has never given me any indication of feeling alarm about the Jewish situation in Italy. But in this last letter, the last paragraph reads as follows:

“If we should be going away from here, I’ll cable you. As long as I do not cable, you will know that we are here in the shelter of this simple and comfortable room with the kind Garguilos”.

I believe the G–s are the proprietors of the hotel.

This summer (July 1 to September 15) I have heard from Isabelle less often than usual, and I know that she was less well than in the winter. But when she did write, she always told me that there were some nice Americans staying at the Cocumella, and that she enjoyed their company when she was well enough to see them. One of these people was Miss [Florence] Overton, director of the branches of the New York Public Library, and as soon as I get my trunks unpacked, I shall go to see her for information. Miss Overton was in Sorrento in the early part of the summer, and I think the Jewish question had not yet arisen when she sailed for home. If, from her or from any other source, I get any information about the Hambourgs’ actual position there at the present time, you may be sure that I will let you know at once.

Very cordially yours,

Willa Cather

TO THORNTON WILDER

October 9, 1938

New York City

Dear Thornton Wilder;

For nearly a year I have been wanting to write to you. I truly think “Our Town” is the loveliest thing that has been produced in this country in a long, long time—and the truest. From several technical points of view it is highly important, as nearly everyone recognized at once. But of course its great importance is something that everyone feels and nobody can define: we can only vaguely say the “spiritual quality” of the play. Two hearings of it are not enough. I must hear it once again before I leave for Jaffrey New Hampshire to spend a few weeks on Monadnock. I have been going there in the autumn for fifteen years, and in your play I find a complete expression of everything I have ever seen and felt and become friends with in that countryside and in all the little towns scattered about the foot of that mountain. Something enduring and resigned and gracious lies behind the details of your play, as the mountain lies behind (and permeates) all those little towns and farms, and the lives of all those people. Exiled Americans, living abroad, to whom I have sent the book of the play, write me that it has made them weep with homesickness.

I love everything you have ever written, but you have done nothing so fine as this. I am not only happy about it, but thankful for it.

Faithfully yours

Willa Cather

TO FERRIS GREENSLET

October 12 [1938]

Dear F.G.

No, please. By no means let Antonia go on the air. Thank you for letting me know about this proposition, as I have a strong feeling against it.

Isabelle McClung Hambourg died yesterday, in Sorrento, Italy. I need scarcely tell you that this [is] another great change in life for me. It is only four months since my brother Douglass, the one closest to me in my family, died of a heart attack, in California. They were the two people dearest to me.

Faithfully

Willa Cather

TO IRENE MINER WEISZ

October 14 [1938]

Dearest Irene;

Isabelle Hambourg died in Sorrento, October 10. Her last letter to me was dated September 24. It was written in the garden, looking out on the bay and Vesuvius; she was in her wheelchair enjoying the autumn weather.

With Douglass and Isabelle both gone out of my life, I scarcely know how I shall go on. Please tell Carrie.

Lovingly

Willie

You and Mr. Weisz were so nice to her. I shall not forget, ever.

TO EDITH MCCLUNG

October 24, 1938

My dear Edith:

Please excuse my typing this letter. My hand-writing grows more and more difficult to read, and I don’t wish you to puzzle over it.

I feel very remorseful that I did not telegraph you when I received a cable from Jan a few days after Isabelle’s death. I thought, of course, that he would have cabled you at the same time. On the same afternoon that I got Jan’s cable I got a long distance telephone call from my sister-in-law in Sacramento, telling me that my older brother [Roscoe] was having dangerous hemorrhages after an operation, and asking me whether I could come on by air at short notice. His condition remained dangerous for four days, and during that time I was in a half-stupified condition. This house was full of paperers and painters, so I went to the Lowell Hotel and took the rooms which Isabelle used to occupy, awaiting the issue. If conditions had been otherwise, I would naturally have written to you at that time, even though I took it for granted that Jan had cabled you word of Isabelle’s death. He should have done so, but I cannot blame the poor distracted man for anything he did not do; there is so much red tape to be gone through when a foreigner dies in Italy and is buried there.

Jan’s letter to me about the last days of Isabelle’s illness probably came on the same boat as his letter to you, and it tells practically the same story. In one paragraph he says:

“During nearly five days I watched her strong, loyal and loving heart resist death. Not more than half a dozen times did her face show anguish or anxiety, then only for a few minutes. She slept as though under the influence of a potent anaesthetic. As she died her face took on a perfectly calm remote look. After three hours her lips shaped into a gentle gracious smile. The parish priest came on Saturday and prayed for her. The Nuns (who had been at her bedside day and night) dressed our Darling in her favorite lace dress and she looked so handsome—her distinguished self.”

Isabelle’s last letter to me was a short one, dated September 24th. It was written on her knee as she was sitting in the garden. She says: “These September days are soft and warm and lovely. We are down on the terrace, so this untidy note is being written on my knee.” All the first part of September she was able to walk with Jan down to the end of the garden and sit looking at the sea. I think September 24th must have been her last walk to the terrace. The letter is short, but the tone of it very cheerful.

Everyone who saw Isabelle during her stay at the Hotel Cocumella speaks of the beauty and dignity of her life there; how she never oppressed anyone with a sense of her illness, and how everyone loved to be with her and felt privileged to have a little private conversation with her. When she did not feel strong enough to see people (which was often) she stayed in her room or sat on her little balcony in the sun. She did not go down to dinner except when she could appear with graciousness and ease of manner.

I had made all arrangements to go to Sorrento in July, but on June 13th my brother Douglass died in Los Angeles of coronary thrombosis—having had no previous illness. After that I felt unequal to the voyage, but had planned to spend a part of this winter in Sorrento.

Surely, when you saw Isabelle last you must have realized that her time was short. Her doctors at the Lenox Hill Hospital thought she could scarcely hold out through the year. That was why I followed her a few weeks after they sailed for France, and rejoined them there, and spent the autumn there at a nearby hotel, so I could be with her every day. Nobody ever bore a long and fatiguing illness with more courage and more dignity. When I went over to Paris in 1930, she was already very ill. I went over in April and stayed until late November. She was even then struggling under a dragging fatigue which almost never left her. She had lived for years on the strictest diet, cutting out everything that increased blood pressure, except weak tea in the afternoon and a few cigarettes. She knew nothing definite about her kidneys being wrong until she came back to New York. Perhaps that was just as well. As you know, when people have that particular defect of the kidneys, they are born with it, and it develops slowly all through their lives. Nothing can be done about it, and I think it was better that she was spared the knowledge of an incurable defect as long as possible. It seems just too cruel that such a thing should fall upon her, of all people. But even that slow poisoning could not take away anything of the beauty, or charm, or great heartedness she had for the people who loved her,—and they were many. Jan’s absolute devotion to her during her long illness was very precious to her, and even people who sometimes found him a little difficult could never find anything to criticize in him as a husband. She hated being handled by nurses. She loved having him give her her bath, lift her when it was hard for her to rise, and by so many delicate attentions disguise her actual infirmities from everyone.

You probably do not realize, Edith, how much it pleased her that you took the trouble to come down to New York and see her several times when she was in the hospital. Her uncle Will’s going to Cherry Valley to see her was another thing that warmed her heart—she could never speak of it without tears.

Poor Jan; I am very impatient with him sometimes—he is so impractical in some things, but Heaven knows he loved and admired Isabelle every day they lived together, and that was her one great solace in the cares and anxieties and suffering that she lived through during these last twelve years. I think I can say that she was never really unhappy, and I know that she had times of great happiness. She made many warm and beautiful friendships, and even on the date of her last letter, September 24th, she was still loving life. You can understand that living will never be the same for me again. I don’t yet know where I am or what kind of future there will be for me in a world in which there is no Isabelle to write to or to go to. It will take me a long while to get used to things as they are now.

I have written at greater length than I intended, Edith, and I will ask you to regard this letter as confidential to you. I don’t wish to be telling more about Isabelle than she would have told about herself. To anyone who truly loved her you might wish to quote from this letter, but not to anyone else, please. Near of kin are not always kind of heart. I feel sure she would not wish her cousins, the Lees, to know anything about her life, though she was very fond of their mother, her “Aunt Beck”. I know she was truly fond of her cousin Mary Griswold (?) I am not sure about the name, though I remember the girl very well. I think she and her brothers now live in Florida.

Sincerely yours

Willa Cather

TO ROSCOE CATHER

November 6 [1938]

Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

My Dear Brother;

How can I help worrying when you let yourself be carved up by a smooth talking insurance man? The surgeon whom I consulted in N.Y. said quietly that your hemorrhages were the result of bad technique or bad judgment, probably both, on the part of your doctor. You would have saved time in the end, and much vitality, if you had gone to the Mayo Clinic where thousands of similar operations have taught the men to guard against possible consequences, and where the surgeons aren’t looking for operations but looking toward the long afterwards. I have a hard appendix, but they refused to operate because it would take too much out of my vitality and working power. For the same reason they refused to remove Dorothy Canfield’s very disfiguring goitre.

Your one fault, my dear boy, (the only one I know of) is that you have always been too willing to trust people—you think too well of them. It’s an engaging fault. I don’t mind when it concerns your mind and estate, but for heaven’s sake dont let the persuasive talkers practice on your body. You have but one, you know. You are trusting the ability of your two well-meaning brothers much too far, I think. But that concerns only money losses, it doesn’t endanger your life.

I am up here alone at this hotel in the woods where I have done most of my best work and where the proprietors are so kind to me. I finished “Antonia” here, finished “A Lost Lady” and began the “Archbishop”. The best part of all the better books was written here. It was Isabelle who first brought me here. You cannot imagine what her death means to me. It came just four months after Douglass’ death, before I had got my nerves steady again. No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years, as she did. As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer. But it will break me in the end. I feel as if I couldn’t go another step. People say I have a “classic style”. A few of them know it’s the heat under the simple words that counts. I early learned that if you loved your theme enough you could be as mild as a May morning and still make other people care—people in countries who read it in the strangest languages—Hungarian and Roumanian are the latest. Some day you must come and see my whole bookcase full of translations. It’s the one thing that simple really caring for an old Margie, an old cat, an old anything. I never cultivated it, from the age of twenty on I did all I could to repress it, and that effort of mind did, after years, give me a fairly good “style”—style being merely the writer, no the person himself; what he was born with and what he has done for himself. Isabelle watched me every step of the way. But the source of supply seems to be getting low. I work a little every day (1½ hrs.) to save my reason, to escape from myself. But the sentences don’t come sharp and clear as they used to—the pictures are a little blurred. Perhaps it’s fatigue only—I hope so. This book [Sapphira and the Slave Girl] has been twice interrupted by death, and twice by illness. I keep it up not for the book itself, but for the peace it brings me to follow old activities that used to be so happy—so rapid and so absolutely absorbing.

Goodbye dear. I’ve not written so long a letter in a long time—except to Isabelle’s poor devoted and now desolate husband.

TO MARGARET CATHER SHANNON

Wednesday [probably November 9, 1938]

Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

[Written in the top margin:] The Parker House is where I always stop—very picturesque part of Boston.

Yes, little Dear; I am here, and hope to be all this month. I want to be alone as long as I can. That is the only way I can pull out of things. You see there are some people one loves and is proud of, as I was of Douglass. Then there are some people who have been a part of one’s inner and outer life for so long that one does not know how to go forward without them. Thirty eight years ago Isabelle McClung, Judge [Samuel A.] McClung’s daughter, took me into her father’s comfortable well-ordered house in Pittsburgh. I was a poor schoolteacher, at sixty dollars a month, living in a boarding house. I was a raw, densely ignorant, but very happy girl from the west—found everything jolly. I knew something about books. Isabelle knew very little about books, but everything about gracious and graceful living. We brought each other up. We kept on doing that all our lives. For most of my life in Pittsburgh (five years) Isabelle and, I think, your father, were the only two people who thought there was any good reason for my trying to write—was it merely an excuse for not getting married? Isabelle has always been my best and soundest critic,—in some ways better than Edith, who knows much more about the technique of writing. I have sent Isabelle every manuscript before I published [part missing?] were always invaluable. Her husband is returning to me three hundred of my letters which she carried about with her from place to place all the time. She had lived abroad for fourteen years, but I often went to her, and in mind we were never separated. Now we have no means of communication; that is all. One can never form such a friendship twice. One does not want to. As long as she lived, her youth and mine were realities to both of us.

Goodbye, my precious girl, be young, be happy, as my Yehudi and Nola are.

Lovingly

W.S.C.

TO ROSCOE CATHER

Sunday, December 25 [1938]

My Dear Roscoe;

Potted plants kept coming in all day yesterday until the apartment was full of them. Then we went tea with the Menuhins at five. When I came home at seven, for dinner, a box from Irene Hays, the very smartest New York florist was on my desk. “Yehudi, of course: he often sends me flowers from there[”]. When I opened the box I took out the richest purple violets I have seen this winter—and your card. I simply burst into tears. It was instantaneous. Disappointment? Exactly the opposite. Surprise and delight. It was an emotion made up of many things. One’s family do not see one in a “romantic” light. That is natural. Douglass always sent me a gunny sack full of walnuts at Christmas time. It was nice of him. But no man of my own family ever sent me flowers before, and though flowers come to me so many, so many and so often, these violets broke me all up for a moment—and filled me with a strange kind of pride. They were on my breakfast table this morning, and are before me on my table as I write. My pleasure seems out of proportion to the cause. But the cause is everything; from the days when we used to sleep up in the old attic with the snow blowing in, and listen to trains whistle in that bitter cold air, and it matters more to me to have you throw me a bouquet than to have all the other flowers that come to me on my birthday and Christmas. You brought back to me something of Christmases long ago, when I had so much hope—and so little to found it on. But we three older ones did love each other, and we found life pretty thrilling when we went to the South Ward school.

A Happy New Year, dear, to you and Meta.

Willie

[On back of envelope:] Please let me know where you will be two weeks from now.

TO EDWARD WAGENKNECHT

December 31, 1938

My dear Mr. Wagenknecht:

Thank you for your kind words about the Autograph Edition. I think Mr. [Bruce] Rogers did a very fine piece of work—indeed, he never does anything that has not distinction.

I never received the copy of the Sewanee Review. I was abroad during most of ’29 and ’30, and my publishers cannot forward second class mail to me. There is too much of it.

Now to the object of your letter. You will see that in returning the list you sent me I have crossed out six of the early stories you attribute to me, because they are not really genuine; some of them are wholly spurious. I cannot give you the history of each of these, but let us take the first one, “On the Divide”. It was a college theme written for a weekly theme class. The professor was a very young man, just out of college himself, and was one of those mistaken young men who think they can reflect credit upon their department by rushing their students into print. As the Overland Monthly did not pay for contributions, he was able to get it printed there. Before he sent it there, he touched it up very considerably and added what he called “color”. My theme was a short account of a Swede farmer who carried off a girl in a storm. I forget now how much the professor added, but I remember I was amazed when he attributed to this Swede some skill in wood carving—said he did this in his lonely hours, or something of that sort. I have only the dimmest recollection of this theme, but I remember that he put in several high spots which amazed me. Incidently, he had the story printed quite without my knowledge. I was not in the least offended, and thought he had been very kind to dress up a dull college theme.

The story “Eldorado” [“El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional”], though it was written much later, was sent to the same professor and highly retouched by him. He was older by that time, and so was I,—but we were neither of us any wiser. I will say for myself however, that I had no intention of publishing the story. It was the result of a kind of correspondence course which I kept up with this young man after I left college. The other stories which I have marked out as wholly or partially spurious, were the collective effort of a club of four youngsters, of whom I was one, who worked on Pittsburgh newspapers. The reason that the stories were sent about under my name was that, thanks to the young professor to whom I have just referred, I had had several stories printed in magazines while the other members had not. The New England Magazine did not pay for contributions, any more than did the Overland Monthly, so there were no profits to be shared. I had almost entirely forgotten about this little club of newspaper youngsters, but we had a jolly time collaborating, and the results, though worthless enough, did nobody any harm.

The first published story which was altogether my own work was “A Death in the Desert”, published in Scribner’s. I forget the date. The remaining titles on your list, beginning with 1907, are all protected by copyright, which I am very careful to renew at proper intervals, as I wish to keep the stories out of print. They are all immature work, most of them carelessly written in the intervals of very exacting editorial work. I became an editor on the staff of McClure’s magazine in 1907, and managing editor in 1908. Several attempts have been made to print collections of these stories by small publishing houses in the West, but we have always been able to prevent it. An instructor in one of the western colleges had several of the stories made up in mimeograph sheets, which he used in his class room. But some copies were circulated outside the class room, and I was able to stop it and have all mimeograph copies destroyed. In many states the law rules that any form of reproducing a writer’s work without the writer’s consent is a form of publishing. I do not know what the law may be on this point in the State of Washington, and I do sincerely hope that I shall not have occasion to ask my attorney to investigate.

My dear Professor Wagenknecht, your quotation from the publisher who put out the early essays of George Eliot is simply a publisher’s salesman talk. There is no interest or profit for any “scholar” in examining immature and labored productions. There is no profit in it even for this sales-talking publisher. When an American publisher put out a volume of Kipling’s very early work which had run out of copyright, he made nothing on it at all—I believe he lost money.

I am sorry to say that I cannot by any twist of thinking, construe your wish to call attention to these long forgotten stories, signed with my name, as a friendly wish.

It seems to me a rather indelicate proceeding on your part. I cannot imagine myself doing such a thing with Mr. Hemingway’s early work, for instance.

Suppose I were an apple grower, and, packing my year’s crop, I were very careful to put only the apples I thought reasonably sound into the packing boxes, leaving the defective ones in a pile on the ground. While I am asleep or at dinner, a neighbour comes to the orchard and puts all the worthless apples into the boxes that are to go to market. Would you call that a friendly action, or the neighbour a friendly man? Writing is subject to outside conditions; to drought, crow-peckings, wasps, hail storms, just as much as apples are. The honest writer, like the honest fruit grower, sorts his work over and tries to keep only what is fairly sound. Everyone has that right of supervision over their handiwork—the carpenter, the dressmaker, the cabinetmaker. He can put his flimsy work in his cellar and forget it, and our copyright laws give the writer the same privilege.

Very truly yours,

Willa Cather

TO ROSCOE CATHER

[Probably January 1939]

No, my dear Roscoe, it was not business trouble that I meant to write you about when I asked where you would be in January. Sometimes I wish to speak to you “personally”, as you do to me in your letter which just came.

Since I have lost Isabelle there is now no one to whom I can show things to—no one who will take pleasure in pleasant recognition that comes my way. Of course Alfred Knopf is always interested, but he takes the lofty stand that whatever I do is pretty good, and it’s no matter what people say, while to me it does matter what some people say. People like Tweedsmuir [John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir]—because his book on Augustus Caesar [Augustus] seems to me the best piece of historical writing that has come along in years, and because he is a finished scholar.

The Swedish review is a fine piece of critical work because it tells exactly why the book was written as it was; the low tone, the respectful distance which I tried to keep between the characters and myself. And he is equally good on [D. H.] Lawrence, whom I knew very well.

So if you are not too busy, I would like to send you such things from time to time. The Menuhins are like Alfred—they think high praise comes naturally to me, as to them. A few years ago Yehudi told a reporter that his favorite authors were Victor Hugo and Willa Cather!

But you know it’s a long road from Red Cloud to any sort of finish.

Look the enclosures over when you have leisure and a good cigar, and when you and Meta have read them, mail them back to me, registered post.

Lovingly

Willie

TO BURGES JOHNSON

January 12, 1939

My dear Mr. Johnson:

Certainly, you may quote anything you wish from “Not Under Forty” and anything you select from my letter to “Pat” Knopf, provided you don’t select a statement that is too informal or rather exaggerated. I don’t remember now just how informal my letter was, but I remember that I gave him my real reasons for writing “The Professor’s House” in the form I did. I thought the unusual structure was sufficiently bound together by the fact that the Professor’s life with Tom Outland was just as real and vivid to him as his life with his family, and because Tom Outland was in the Professor’s house so much during his student life. He and the atmosphere he brought with him became really a part of the house—that is, of the old house which the Professor could not altogether leave. If I had happened to write the book in a very modernistic manner, letting everybody’s thoughts and memories and shades of feeling tumble into the book helter-skelter, I could have made a rather exciting color study. But the trouble is, these stunts, while they are very exciting, seem to leave nothing behind—no after taste for the writer. They go up, and out, like rockets.

May I say, Mr. Johnson, that I am very happy that “Pat” is so interested in his work under you? I think it is a genuine interest. There is good material in “Pat”, but he has been under very poor teachers and had the misfortune in early boyhood to be thrown among a lot of very showy and rather clever people. That is the almost inevitable fate of the only son of a publisher in this particular time. A great many very cheap people come and go in a publisher’s office these day[s], and young lads cannot very well judge which are the wise ones and which are the wisecrackers.

Very cordially yours,

Willa Cather

TO YALTAH MENUHIN STIX

Monday [January 23, 1939]

New York City

My darling Yaltah,

We have had wonderful cold weather and lots of snow. I have been walking around the Reservoir alone—but pleasant memories kept me company. There [are] very few people that I like to walk with—only three whom I like very much to walk with!

I am overwhelmed with business—trying to keep a very poor French translation of the “Archbishop” from being published in Paris. The Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Slovak ones are said to be very good, so why should the French one be so dull and plodding! Isn’t it stupid!

My precious, if you have a Bible in the house (and maybe you have the one dear Marutha bought from the agent long ago—so characteristic of her!) anyway, if you have one, please read the First and Second Books of Samuel, so that you can enjoy a beautiful book I am going to send you; J. M. Barrie’s last play “The Boy David”. It failed in London, because nobody there reads the Old Testament now-a-days. But I think you will see how wonderfully Barrie does the future man in the boy. And I think Marutha will love it, too. Maybe you would like to know that, like you, Barrie had a special fondness for the “Archbishop”. I am so glad I was able to interest him (to give him some distraction, I mean) when he was old and ill.

Goodnight, my dear, my especially dear Yaltah.

Your Aunt Willa

P.S.

Tuesday [January 24, 1939]

Oh Yaltah, the boy David, the young shepherd, is such an enchanting creature! I have just read the 1st & 2nd Books of Samuel over again with delight. One must have the unadorned facts in one’s mind to see what Barrie was trying to do in his lyrical play. I wish some one would select the best Psalms of David and publish them in a small volume. They are great poetry. No one alive on this earth today can write such poetry.

TO DAYTON M. KOHLER

March 16, 1939

My Dear Mr. Kohler;

What is the use? Hitler entered Prague last night. President Masaryk was an old friend of mine. He was a scholar and a lover of letters. In my childhood I had many Czech friends. I love their way of life. And what about “British honor”, which I have always believed in? However much we may try to live in a nobler past, this thing has come upon us and lowers our vitality and our wish to live.

Thank you for your kind and friendly letter. Those books were written in better times than this.

Sincerely yours

Willa Cather

TO ELIZABETH CATHER ICKIS

March 30 [1939]

My Darling Elizabeth;

I am proud as a peacock to be a great aunt! And I am so glad you have named the baby Margaret. Her aunt Margaret was here in this apartment the day after she got the news and was in a flutter of excitement. She so hoped you would name the baby for her, but said it would probably be named for you and Lynn’s [Ickis] mother. She said she didn’t see how she could wait for months to see you and the baby. I should just like to go and see that baby myself! Mary Virginia was here for dinner last night and was thrilled to hear about your having a daughter. Poor little M.V.—I sometimes fear she has had to wait too long to start a family—and worked too hard. It’s a wise girl who marries a man with a job, who can go and “get the little rabbit skin”. Kiss Margaret on her black head for me. I send you a world of love, dear.

Your Aunt Willie

TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD

June 28, 1939

My dear Carrie:

You have probably already been surprised by receiving a fat book from the Channel Book Shop. I wanted to send it to you in the early part of last winter, but I thought then you would be getting ready for Christmas. Then I thought I would send it sometime during February or March, but for both of those two months I was too ill with influenza to do anything, and I got so behind in replying to important letters that I have only just now caught up.

And now it is early summer, when every housekeeper is too busy to read anything. So I’ll just ask you to tuck this book away and read some portions of it next winter, when the days are quiet. I send you the book, of course, because of the rather interesting and original articles on modern writers—though I like the chapters on Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot.

Two years ago a French scholar at the University of Toulouse wrote a study of all my books, which I want some day to have translated for a few of my American friends. It is some four hundred pages long, and I have been too busy to bother to get a translator for it. But next to that book, I think the short chapter on my books in Margaret Lawrence’s “School of Femininity” is the one I would most like you to read—and to keep. I like the article not chiefly because it is flattering, but because the writer says what she has to say in few words, and without rambling. If there is any real merit in my books, she puts her finger on the root of it. I once sent you a lot of English reviews, and you will remember that even the most enthusiastic reviewers never attempted to say why they got a special pleasure out of this or that book. They talk about “atmosphere”, “style”, “form”, etc., but Miss Lawrence puts it in a very few words. She seems to understand that I can write successfully only when I write about people or places which I very greatly admire; which, indeed, I actually love. The characters may be cranky and queer, or foolhardy and rash, but they must have something in them which gives me a thrill and warms my heart. Now this is something I would never have said myself to anyone, but since Miss Lawrence has said it for me, I want you to have this confession of faith in her words. I hope that both you and Mary will at some time find time to read it, and I hope you will agree with me, that it would not be wise to show it to other people in my home town. I do not believe there is anyone but you and Mary who would not feel a little,—well, a little spiteful, you know. Nevertheless, I would like one person in my home town to have such a clear explanation of the way in which my books really were written, and I would like you to be that person. You, more than any other one person now living, know a great deal of the material that went into some of the books. And those things we will keep to ourselves. They do not belong to the gossips. I have heard that Verna Trine considers herself the original of Lucy Gayheart, and that another so-called friend at home considers that I thought I was writing about myself when I wrote Lucy’s story: that I dressed myself out in brown eyes and red cheeks and a bewitching personality, and quite believe that I was like that! You and I know who the girl was who used to skate in the old rink, dressed in a red jersey. But please tell me, Carrie, did Sadie Becker have golden-brown eyes? The picture was perfectly clear to me when I was writing the book, but since then a queer doubt has come over me, and I sometimes think they were gray! But I can hear her contralto laugh today, as clearly as I did when I was twelve.

A great many things have happened in my life, dear Carrie, since I last wrote you a long letter. I have often wanted to write, but my heart always failed me. I am now looking at the very spot on the rug where Douglass stood, so big and strong, when he gave me a last hug before he dashed off to catch the plane that took him westward. I want you to know that during the ten days he spent here, we had almost a lifetime of happiness. On my birthday I stuffed the turkey for him myself, because my very excellent French cook could never make the kind of stuffing Grandma Boak used to make, and that was the kind he liked best. A great many flowers always come in on that day, and he spent the afternoon helping me to arrange them. The only interruption in his visit was that I had to send him to the theater alone one evening, because I had an important engagement to dine with an English publisher who was sailing the next day. I bitterly regret that lost evening, but the date had been arranged early in October.

I have lost many friends within the last few years, but losing Isabelle and Douglass within four months has made me a different person, and I shall never be the same again.

This past winter was a hard one to live through. The brightest thing in it was the solicitous affection and loyalty of the Menuhin family, and my great happiness in learning to know and truly love Yehudi’s wife. She has all the directness and firmness of her solid Scotch ancestry. She is sweet, yet decided; the more I know her, the more I feel she is right for him in every way. Marriage is apt to make or mar a young artist, but Yehudi has been as fortunate in this as he has been in other things. It was her character and the direct, clear look in her eyes, that first drew him to her. They came to see me when I was ill, and when I was well we were often together, the three of us. I loved being with the two of them almost more than I used to love being with Yehudi alone. You know, splendid young people can always make me very happy—they seem to give me something to live for. And these two fill my heart with joy, even when I am sad. Cablegrams and long letters from Hephzibah, in Australia, bring her very close to me. And I enjoy her life in wild Victoria, on a ranch with twenty-five thousand sheep, as much as I enjoyed her professional success. Think of the courage and high-heartedness of a girl who could lightly drop a career and cancel her engagements in all the capitals of Europe, to go to Australia and live “a much realer life”, as she writes me. I have not met her husband, but I love him from his letters, and because he is Nola’s brother and Hephzibah’s husband.

This is a long letter, dear Carrie, but so many things have been happening to me, and I have been out of your life so long, that I want to get back into it again.

Lovingly to you and Mary

Willie

I was so truly disappointed to miss Father [Dennis] Fitzgerald [of Red Cloud]. I was in New Hampshire when he was here. The people at the Knopf office were sorry I missed him—they liked him at first sight. Thank Mary for her letter. I always love to hear from her.

I shall be leaving for Canada soon.

TO FERRIS GREENSLET

October 19, 1939

Dear F.G.:

The Swedish books have just come, and I thank you. Also, I want to thank you for the copy of the “College Reader” you sent me.

Will you be annoyed if I call your attention to some errors in the biographical notice of William Archer? Mr. Archer and I were friends from 1908 until the time of his death. When I went to London every year for McClure’s, and he was my guide and advisor while I was there. He took me to George Meredith’s funeral. We saw the Abbey Theatre Company the first night they ever played in London, sat in [William Butler] Yeats’ box with Lady Gregory. When I came back from a stay in Italy in January 1921, “The Green Goddess” was in full swing in New York. I found a letter from Archer awaiting me at my house, had dinner with him as soon as possible, and he told me the whole story of “The Green Goddess”. He had written me the story of his work on the play, indeed, in 1916 or 1917. The play was written in those years, not in 1920, as this biographer states. He wrote the play to relieve the boredom of his position as censor of the Dublin, Ireland, post office. Archer’s interest was always in plays with a spiritual motive, and a burning purpose. He was one of the first, if not the first English critic to feel the poetry of [John Millington] Synge’s plays when they were produced in London. But he had also been interested in the pure mechanics of the drama, though he had no admiration for carpenter-made plays. He enlivened his routine in Dublin by making a purely mechanical play, where the interest was produced by time honored situations dressed in modern clothes. Play carpentry, he called it. He thought its success was due to the fact that [George] Arliss played it more than to any other reason. He rather liked making so much money, of course.

The introductory notice speaks casually of his interest in Ibsen. Ibsen was the great enthusiasm of his life. He not only pushed Ibsen’s plays in England, and “edited” them as your biographer says; he was the sole translator of many of the best plays, among them “A Doll’s House”, “Pillars of Society”, “Ghosts”, “An Enemy of Society”. He and Edmund Gosse translated “The Master Builder”. These are the only Ibsen plays I happen to have in my bookcase, but I know that Archer translated still other Ibsen plays. I wonder why your editors chose to use “The Green Goddess” in the “Reader”. But since they did, I think the introductory note should have been more accurate. Of course, the play was first produced in Philadelphia, December 27, 1920, but Archer had written me an outline of it in ’16 or ’17, and it was written in those years.

I do not suppose you have much to do with the text book section of the publishing house, so perhaps it is foolish in me to trouble you. One does, however, hate to see an old friend presented in such a misleading fashion. The man who first translated and popularized Ibsen in English, did a great service to the English stage. That work was important and formative, and it was the serious work of Archer’s life. “The Green Goddess” was the diversion of a dull year or two.

Faithfully yours,

Willa Cather

[Included is the brief biography of Archer to which Cather refers. She underscored the word “edited” in a sentence about Archer and Ibsen, drew a line from it to the margin, and wrote:] A very different job from translating.