by Willa Cather
Some friend of hers has had a little lift put in the house for her, and I learned to be an expert elevator boy. So if I fail as managing editor, I can still hope to get a job with the company. The lift saves Mrs. Field’s strength greatly, and I bless the friend.
Don’t speak to me of ears! I’ve had them—mastoid. Doesn’t [John] Milton say something about “trembling ears?” Well, mine tremble when I hear of anyone going to an aurist. I am so sorry, so sorry that you’ve had bother with yours. I hope the specialist has given you an honorable discharge by this.
Mr. McClure stays abroad for months and months, and won’t be home until July, so I am afraid I won’t get over this summer. But when I come I’ll run you down. All luck and love to you!
Affectionately
Willa S. C.
In the early part of the twentieth century, many well-educated women were deeply engaged in reform efforts across a wide spectrum of issues. Hull House, mentioned in the next letter, was a settlement house established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago, Illinois, in 1889 to help recent immigrant communities adapt to urban American life. Sisters Josephine and Pauline Goldmark, friends of both Cather’s and Elizabeth Sergeant’s, were two of the leading reformers in New York at this time. It is unclear which sister is referred to here.
TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT
[June 4, 1911]
Dear Miss Sergeant;
This time the candy came straight to the mark, and I’ve now been nibbling at it for three days with the greatest possible comfort. And there is still lots and lots of it left, you sent such a big box. I have had a great deal of fun out of that box.
One of the Hull House women came to the office yesterday. She said that Miss Wyatt has given herself over wholly to the cause of the White Slave; that she never talks or thinks about anything else, and feels pretty bitterly toward those of us here who didn’t sympathize with her. I’m sorry. I’ve seldome been more disappointed than I was when I found that we had no possible point of contact. She seems to me to be maddened by having lived to long in the company of a horrible idea—like Electra. She used to frighten me. Her eyes seemed to burn with a rage to destroy the germ which replenishes the race. I cant chat comfortably with people who are panting for the destruction of anything. Would that she could forget it all, and begin to be touched by the amusing traits of human nature again! Oh I must tell you; she says that the ones who go back to it are the most wronged slaves of all for they have been made the slaves of an appetite! Aren’t we all? Even Miss Wyatt and Cassandra, the slaves of some taste or other?
Miss McClung arrives Tuesday, and I hope we shall be seeing Miss Goldmark within the next week. I wish you could be here. I awfully want Isabelle to know you, and you’d like her. She’s so fond of lovely things and so full of them, and so frightened of reformers.
Thanks a million million times for everything. And I’m so glad you got in to have tea with me!
Faithfully
Willa Cather
Cather’s mention of “those stories of mine” in the letter below was likely referring to The Troll Garden, and the “little western story” was probably “The Enchanted Bluff,” published in Harper’s in April 1909.
TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT
June 27, 1911
South Berwick, Maine
Dear Miss Sergeant:
Some day I am going to answer your nice letter, and tell you how glad I am that you found anything to like in those stories of mine. They were written a long while ago and seem very far away from me. I can’t see much in them now but the raging bad temper of a young person kept away from the things she wanted. The note of personal discomfort does distort, even in the Western ones. Not very long ago I published a little western story which I think is candid and not chesty. If I can find a copy someday I will send it to you.
But this note is only to thank you for your good letter and to let you know that I am in the place of all places where I can rest most perfectly, and that I am saluting you from the little desk where it all happened. In this garden I can forget the facts that do confront us—Rex Beach and the White Slave and all such cheerful things; all the overwhelming vulgarity in which we live. It’s good to come here where the very young woman seems always to be moving about over the smooth garden paths—always a little disdainful, and a little, little self-conscious then—and to brood upon it that we had once that flash of elegance. Never was a house so permeated by a presence [Sarah Orne Jewett] as this one is.
Miss Goldmark delivered your message—we had a splendid evening with her—and you may be sure that if I can go to Dublin [New Hampshire], I’ll at least telegraph and give you the chance to say that you are or are not otherwise engaged. I would love to go. I’ll be going down to New York, alas, tomorrow.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
TO ELSIE CATHER
August 30 [1911]
My Dear Little Sister
Of course I want you to come for a week or eight days before you go to Northampton. We wont begin to tear up the place much before the 20th. I want you to see the last of the apartment. We have a good maid so you can really be comfortable.
Ask Margie [Anderson] if she has ever found the pictures of Willow Shade [the Cather family home in Virginia] she said she would hunt for. I do awfully want one. I wonder where Grandma Cather’s pictures of the place are?
I’m so glad, so awfully glad you all like the Swedish Mother [a poem of Cather’s published in the September 1911 issue of McClure’s], and that Mary Virginia knows who the people are. Tell her her “Nanypaw” ought to remember one special night when he left me by the barn of the field we called “the mountain field” when I actually saw the nose of the bear between the bushes, only the nose, and it looked a good deal like a pig’s, but it made me very unhappy. I used generally to wait under a hawthorne tree that grew by the barn and was very lovely in the spring, but I didn’t know what the Swede woman would call a hawthorne tree. Mr. McClure says the poem has been a good deal talked about wherever he has gone and that “he is as proud of it as if he had done it himself”. I’m glad people like it, and everyone says “what a dear little girl”. “Red-haired” doesn’t seem to me a very specific adjective, but it seems to make a picture to everyone.
I’ll be so, so glad to see you, Bobbie, and I want to ask you so much and tell you so much. You must tell Mary about the little girl I rescued in the Park when the dog attacked her crow. Tell her she must take her crow to call on Irene [Miner], I know Irene would appreciate it. Just think, you’ll be here at 82 in ten days or so now!
Very lovingly
Willie
Get up on a chair and kiss Toby for me before you leave.
In September 1911 Cather made another decisive change in her life: she left her position as editor at McClure’s when the company went through another financial restructuring, one that removed S. S. McClure from control. She intended to take only a temporary leave of absence and then return to the magazine as a staff writer. During that leave, however, she completed her first novel, and from then on her career was solely that of a professional writer.
Set in Boston and London and centering on a love triangle involving a bridge engineer, his wife, and an actress, Cather’s first novel was serialized as Alexander’s Masquerade in the February, March, and April 1912 issues of McClure’s. It was published in book form by Houghton Mifflin in April 1912 with the title Alexander’s Bridge. Cather later wrote that the book “was the result of meeting some interesting people in London. Like most young writers, I thought a book should be made out of ‘interesting material,’ and at the time I found the new more exciting than the familiar. The impressions I tried to communicate on paper were genuine, but they were very shallow.”
TO S. S. MCCLURE
November 5, 1911
Cherry Valley, New York
Dear Mr. McClure:
I cannot tell you how glad I was to get your two kind letters. I wish you could have s
tayed longer when you were here. You could not get an idea from those few hours of how really well off we are here. The weather is about the only thing that happens, but when one is resting that is quite enough. I am working on another story about the length of the Bridge Builder one, and enjoying it greatly. It is a great relief to get back to writing again. I shall try not even to think about magazine work for awhile, so I won’t write you anything about it this time. We have been much more cheerful since your visit. A talk with you straightened me out more than anything else could have done, and I can tell you that I was much more delighted to see anyone.
Your photographs came on Isabelle’s birthday. We had a grand birthday dinner and wished that you could have been with us. I hope that you are still feeling as well as you were when I saw you.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
The other story she was working on was “The Bohemian Girl,” set in Nebraska and published in the August 1912 issue of McClure’s.
TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT
[Postmarked March 1, 1912]
New York City
Dear Elsie Sergeant;
No! You communicated no germ to me unless it was the coy germ of selling things; for I have actually sold the Bohemian Girl. Isn’t that a jolt? On that sodden Monday when you were taking trains for Boston and when I was lunching with the business manager, he asked me if I had nothing to show for my stay in the country. When I told him that I had a story too long, to “highbrow”, too remote etc, he said he guessed he’d like to see it that night if I’d send it up by the office boy. The next day I had tea with him at the Brevoort and he offered me seven hundred and fifty dollars for it. I laughed him to scorn; he doesn’t know how much a story is worth to his magazine half so well as I do, and I told him so. By no sort of figuring can such a story possibly be worth more than five hundred to McClures, so we finally agreed on that price. But he said I was a silly, and I promised to take $750 for the next one. Everyone in the office was enthusiastic about the story—in the name of goodness why, I wonder? They will publish it this summer, all in one number, though I shall have to cut it some. But isn’t this too amazing? And how can I ever leave the faithful McClure’s? Mr. [Cameron] Mackenzie wrung the plot of the opera singer one out of me and went to the office and told it to everyone, and one of the article writers came to Miss Lewis and asked her which character she thought more interesting, the mother or the daughter! They say they would like the copy July 1, and I have not even a plan for it as yet, and I know it will be distant and sentimental and terribly hard to write. All this, of course, is because the business office has been getting a good many letters and notices about Alexander, so they come after the Harp that Once [song sung by character Hilda Burgoyne in Alexander’s Bridge] with a football tackle. This morning a note comes from Mr. Mackenzie asking for an outline of the unwritten story to advertise in the prospectus! I’ll never be able to write it at all if the advertising man is loosed to snap at my heels. I shall need the imperturbable nerves of Rex Beach himself. Really, I’ve got such a case of stage fright about it that I dont see how I can ever put pen to paper. The brazen immodesty of having your unwritten plot discussed about the office, anyhow!———However, despite these disadvantages, if this was the germ you handed on, I’ll keep it thank you, until you do the sanatorium novel and want it back again.
I wonder whether you’ll be reading this scrawl between gargles; I do hope not. But why didn’t you send for me on Sunday if you were down and out and not doing things? I call that a chill omission. And that Boston train, with a bad throat—! I know all its dismalness: I am really somewhat better and am staying over for the Howells dinner. I keep wishing you could have stayed a little longer, though it was better luck than one usually has to have you here at all. I did get such delight and satisfaction out of seeing you here. As to feeling a drop after you departed—well, one does not so often miss people that one can’t afford a little loneliness. What joyful things we can do the next time we make the same port! I think it will always be easier to catch step again now. My metaphors seem to be a little mixed, but my feelings are quite clear and simple, and its very jolly to care about you so much. Admiration is always a pleasant thing to feel, and I’ve always felt a great deal of that for you, since the first few times I saw you. But you probably know that, without my telling you.
Now I must dress in three square feet of room. I wish the fourth dimension were in practice!
Faithfully always
W.S.C.
Am I becoming cleverer, or is your handwriting plainer than of yore?
It is unclear if the “opera singer one” mentioned above was ever written or published, though later in her career Cather published many works of fiction with opera singers as central characters. The “Howells dinner” was a gala held in honor of writer William Dean Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday. Among those in attendance were Howells’s fellow Ohioan President William Howard Taft.
TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT
Tuesday [March 12, 1912]
Pittsburgh
Dear Elsie
So many things have happened since I got your long letter: Getting away from New York was difficult because the Chief, Mr. McClure arrived and sought me out several days before I came away. When I got here I found Miss McClung’s mother much worse. On Saturday she had a stroke of some sort (no one could know less about what sort than the doctors seem to know) and has been unconscious ever since, though there is no paralysis. Something has happened in her brain, but no one knows more than that. You will be wondering what I am doing, I expect. But really I am doing very well. I am something languid as the result of a bad fright, but really I have managed to get the proper amount of food and sleep and to keep from being excited. The latter has been difficult, but I really have done it. The moment I feel myself getting strung up, I go for a long walk in this wet somber air, and it quiets me like a soporific. Of course when the whole household is waiting rather than living, one cannot lead a normal life, but I do the best I can.
Oh I’d be more than glad to have you in Arizona, highbrow though you are, but you see I am even more plan-less than usual, and more at the bidding of chance. I don’t know when I can leave here, to begin with. Not, of course, until Mrs. McClung begins to pull up a little. Then I dont know whether I shall have to stop a few weeks or only a few days with my mother, and I dont know the least little thing about Winslow [Arizona], the town in which my brother [Douglass] lives. Sometime in April I shall arrive there; if it seems to me a good place, I shall at once let you know; then if you are still unfettered and not already sold into summer slavery, you might take your chance with me and try the desert country. But you see there are so many family complications that I have to be thus casual. All I know is that I shall alight at Winslow sometime this spring.
I was just called to Mrs. McClung’s room to find her for the moment quite conscious. She soon dropped off again but this may be the beginning of a turn for the better. We all feel as if a tight string had snapped and the snapping thereof will bring this dull note to a close. O tea for me, and slumber: The rain without and the fire within have brought me to a state of cat-like drowsiness. Perhaps I shan’t even wait for tea but, like Harry Greene on The Birth Night, sink to sleep on the hearth rug. It’s so good to have people get better. And this gray, sullen weather of itself puts one to sleep. Forgive me that this letter is one week late and empty and drowsy. Many good wishes go with it.
Faithfully yours
Willa Sibert Cather
PART FOUR
Finding Herself as a Writer
1912–1916
I feel as if my mind had been freshly washed and ironed, and were ready for a new life.
—WILLA CATHER TO S. S. MCCLURE, June 12, 1912
Willa Cather at “Cliff Palace” on Mesa Verde, 1915 (photo credit 4.1)
IN THE SPRING OF 1912, Willa Cather was at a turning point in her life. She had succeeded completely in her editorial job at McClure�
��s Magazine, but what she really wanted to do was write fiction. As her first novel was being serialized in the magazine, she took a leave from her job at McClure’s and planned a trip west. Her brother Douglass worked for the Santa Fe railroad in Winslow, Arizona, and she boarded a train in Pittsburgh and went to see him.
This 1912 trip to Arizona and New Mexico changed Willa Cather and the way she wrote. As she reflected later in “My First Novels (There Were Two),” “The longer I stayed in a country I really did care about, and among people who were a part of the country, the more unnecessary and superficial a book like Alexander’s Bridge seemed to me. I did no writing down there, but I recovered from the conventional editorial point of view.” What she saw and did there, and the intensity of emotion that the Southwest evoked in her, gave her the confidence to try a different kind of writing. The story she wrote before she left on her trip, “The Bohemian Girl,” with its Nebraska setting and immigrant characters, presaged the novels to come. When she came back east after several months, she was ready to produce what she called her second “first” novel: O Pioneers! A book about farming people set in Nebraska, it was published in 1913. It was followed in 1915 by The Song of the Lark, a longer novel about a talented western woman’s emergence as a great singer. The psychological high point of that novel—when the heroine, Thea Kronborg, begins to understand what will transform her from a gifted singer into a fine artist—is set in Walnut Canyon, Arizona. Cather knew Walnut Canyon and its power from her visit there in 1912.
