The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  Well, I broke into Julio after all! I was afraid I would, and that’s the real reason I have not written before. Next to “travel” letters, I hate to get letters that rave about the beauty of untutored youths of Latin extraction. People always do one to death with such letters when they go to Italy. But Julio is not soft and sunny. He’s indifferent and opaque and has the long strong upper lip that is so conspicuous in the Aztec sculpture, and somber eyes with lots of old trouble in them, and his skin is the pale, bright yellow of very old gold and old races. I really think I must get him to New York. He’d make an easy living as an artist’s model. They’d fight for him. Pardon!

  W.S.C.

  Cather used the story Julio shared, “The Forty Lovers of the Queen,” in her 1920 short story “Coming, Aphrodite!”

  The following was written on a postcard with a view of the pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico. On the front of the postcard Cather wrote, “Such a lovely place! My brother and I have spent two days here. Behind the church the priest has wonderful gardens, full of parrots and snow-white doves.” Written over the church on the front image are the words “church 1680.”

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  June 2 [1912]

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Dear Elsie:

  Oh I did hope you would never run across that book of bum verse! It seemed quite probable that you never would. I’ve bought up and sunk in a “tarn” all the copies I could get. I thought it entirely dead. I really was very young and had never been—anywhere. But, even for a Cliff Dweller, it was pretty bad. I seem to remember one that began “Stark as a Burne-Jones vision of despair!” I hope you appreciated that fully! But please don’t ever try to buy one. If you dislike me enough to want one, I’d rather give it [to] you than have you pay out money to scorn me.

  She is speaking of her 1903 book of poetry, April Twilights. Her poem “White Birch in Wyoming” does indeed begin “Stark as a Burne-Jones vision of despair,” a reference to the work of the English artist Edward Burne-Jones.

  TO S. S. MCCLURE

  June 12 [1912]

  Red Cloud, Nebraska

  Dear Mr. McClure;

  I sent two letters to you in Paris while I was in New Mexico, but your letters missed me when I was off in the desert on my horseback trip. I reached home yesterday and sent you a telegram explaining. I am distressed to hear of Mrs. McClure’s condition and of all the business troubles which awaited you in New York. You have always been so generous with other people that it seems terribly unjust that you should be harassed and tormented about money in this way. I can not believe that there is not some way out. I can not believe that your career is over. As I told you in New York I never felt the power to do things so strong in you as now. If this were the end of your work, that would be much more remarkable than your original success—quite too remarkable to happen, it seems to me. But I don’t wonder that you are tired. The original contract has undergone so many changes and modifications that I cannot make just what the state of your affairs is now, or what your actual holdings in the stocks of the company are. What ever else I am doing this fall I could certainly give you some help on the Autobiography. Going to London would, I should think, increase the cost of producing it, both for you and for me. I think I ought to be able to do it along with other work, so that I would not have to “charge” you at all for my own work on it. You would have the expense of a good stenographer anyway. My interest in the work would be an interest of friendship, a purely personal interest, and I think I could do it better and would feel more zest in the doing of it, if there were no question [of] payment at all. You have done more favors for me than a few, (more than I could count!) and I should like to have the opportunity to do a small one for you. If I had money or influence, believe me, they should be yours to command. These, alas! I have not. But if my wits can help you out any, that will be a pleasure to me indeed. Of course, I may not be able to write the articles in the way you wish them written; the way in which one writes a thing, you know, is not altogether under one’s control. There were chapters of Christian Science, for instance, which I simply could not write in the way you would have liked best. And so it might be with these autobiographical articles; the events that sing one tune to you might sing another to me; I might not be able to catch step with you. As to all that, we can but try. But if, as the old song says “a willing heart goes all the way,” we shall make out very well; for I was never more willing about a piece of work.

  I have not written a line since I left New York, but I have such a head-full of stories that I dream about them at night. I’ve ridden and driven hundreds of miles. You would not know me, I’m so dark-skinned and good humored. Oh please forget how cranky I used to be when I was tired! I hope Miss Roseboro’ will forget, too. I can’t bear to have either of you remember me like that. It will seem so foolish now; such an ado about nothing. But I’m never going to get fussy like that again. I’ve never been so happy since I was a youngster as I have been this summer, back in my own country with my own people. Those weeks off in the desert with my big handsome brother—six feet four, he is—and his wild pals, are weeks that I shall never forget. They took all the kinks and crumples out. I feel as if my mind had been freshly washed and ironed, and were ready for a new life. I feel, somehow, confident; feel as if I had got my second wind and would never torture my self about little things (like the ART DEPARTMENT!) again. A thousand, thousand good wishes to you, and loyalty and hope:

  Faithfully

  Willa Cather

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  June 15 [1912]

  Red Cloud

  Dear Elsie—

  I did escape, some of me, you see. I wasn’t utterly drunk up by the sand of the desert. But when you are there you do feel as if you might very easily be drunk up. I may still go back for Julio. He would be lovely at Mrs. Fields’. A mimosa tree is nothing to him. But Mrs. Gardener [art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner] would snap him up and take him to Fenway Court and he would like that better than my apartment. The only cloud on my joyful horizon at present is the news that you are no better, or not much better. Oh I wish, I wish you were! Perhaps, after all, Julio would have done you more good than Tryon [North Carolina]. I wish I could simply say “yes” about Paris. But I fear I wont be able to get away. But as to Provence. I know you can work at Avignon, and if the mistral blows there go to Lavendou. A tiny fishing [village] down on the Mediterranean about forty or fifty miles east of Hyères—it may even be nearer. Sea, fine woods, a good hotel, nothing else. No cottages. It is on the coast road to Italy, and motors may have made a difference. The hotel may be more expensive now, but eight years ago it was something less than nothing a day. Trust me, the place is just right for work. And I know you could work in Avignon. The Rhone does put it into one; and the Rhone is your whole life at Avignon—the Rhone and the sun. The place is at its best in September. Oh I wish I were to be with you! But perhaps you can go to Madre Mejicana with me sometime. Julio has a song about “Oh bright-eyed Mexico, oh golden Mexico!” I went to a Mexican dance with Julio the night before I left Winslow, but that was a dance. They have a curious pantomime waltz which a man dances with two women. It is certainly the prettiest dance I’ve ever seen. I was the only “white” at the ball; such music and such dancing. How can I write you about Julio? He is without beginning and without end, and there is no place to begin. He really was like all the things in the Naples museum, and having him about was like living in that civilization. He had a personal elegance of which I’ve never known the like. You see I use the past tense; I did get away. I made a sort of translation of one of his songs which may give you some idea of his music, except that it is sultry and he is not at all sultry, anymore than lightning is. And aside from his lightning aspects he is a very cool and graceful young man who carries his great beauty as lightly as one could ask. This serenade, he explained carefully, is to be sung only by a “married lady”, but she may with perfect propriety sing it to eithe
r her husband or lover.

  I’m so glad to hear of Mrs. [Elia] Peattie’s daughter, and trust she is happy. Her mother was so kind to me long ago. Do let me hear more from you soon. I wish I could give you Julio’s serenade in the Spanish, with the stars and the desert and the dead Indian cities on the mesa behind it. The English is clumsy. But don’t mind the accent on “but”; they have a trick of accenting unimportant words with the guitar and voice, as if, after all, the words were a mere convention, and the undertow was as apt to break through at the wrong place as the right.

  SERENATA MEJICANA

  (Voz Contralto)

  The flowers of day are dead—

  Come thou to me!

  The rose of night instead

  Shall bloom for thee.

  Stars by day entombed

  In darkness wake;

  The rose of night has bloomed—

  Beloved, take!

  The wine of day is spent,

  The springs are dry;

  So long above them bent

  The ardent sky.

  A thirsty lip since dawn

  Hath pressed the fountain’s brink—

  The wine of night is drawn,

  Beloved, drink!

  The eyes of night are shut,

  So thine should be;

  The tired stars fade but

  To dream of thee.

  Dew-drenched blossoms spill

  Their odors deep;

  The heart of night is still—

  Beloved, sleep!

  [Unsigned]

  TO ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS

  June 27, 1912

  Red Cloud

  Dear Mrs. Fields:

  I am at home again with my family, and we are all having a very happy visit together. My mother had to go to Omaha for a surgical operation two months ago, but she recovered very rapidly and is now in splendid health. And so am I! Tomorrow I am going up into the Bohemian country for a week to see the wheat-harvest. That is always a splendid sight, and there is much merry-making among the people. They are a wild, fierce people, but very energetic and intelligent. I have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know [Richard] Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”

  You can scarcely imagine, in the cool shade of the home at Manchester, looking above the tree-tops at the ocean, what torrid weather I am tasting here. The whole great wheat country fairly glows, and you can smell the ripe wheat as if it were bread baking. But the nights are cool, and just now the full moon makes an enchantment over everything. I have been motoring about the country with my father almost every day, but when I go up into the Bohemian township I shall drive, and saunter about from farm to farm in the old-fashioned way.

  Please send a card to me here and tell me how the summer has gone with you so far. I long to tell you about wonderful Arizona. I really learned there what [Honoré de] Balzac meant when he said “In the desert there is everything and nothing—God without mankind.”

  My heart to you, my dearest Lady, and many, many loving thoughts.

  Willa

  I expect to spend August in Pittsburgh with Miss McClung.

  Her buoyant frame of mind helped Cather see literary possibilities in the lives of the Nebraskans with whom she grew up. The next letter references “The White Mulberry Tree,” a story that would become part of O Pioneers! The poem included in the letter, later titled “Prairie Spring,” was printed at the beginning of the novel, almost exactly as it appears here.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  July 5 [1912]

  Red Cloud

  I’m hoping for a line from you that will tell me you are better and at work. I have just come back from the Bohemian country, and next week I go up there again to see the wheat harvest. It is a great sight and I have not beheld it for years. All the prosperous Bohemians have gone back to Prague to a great musical festival. Six hundred left Omaha a few weeks ago. I shall start for Pittsburgh about two weeks from now. There I shall fall to work. I’ve a new story in mind that will terrify Mr. Greenslet. I think I’ll call it “The White Mulberry Tree.”

  W.S.C.

  [Typewritten on a separate sheet of paper:]

  Evening and the flat land,

  Rich and somber and always silent;

  The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

  Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

  The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

  The toiling horses, the tired men,

  The long, empty roads,

  The sullen fires of sunset fading,

  The eternal, unresponsive sky.

  Against all this, Youth,

  Flaming like the wild roses,

  Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

  Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

  Youth, with its insupportable sweetness,

  Its fierce necessity,

  Its sharp desire;

  Singing and singing,

  Out of the lips of silence,

  Out of the earthy dusk.

  [Handwritten at the bottom of the page:] This is how the wheat country seemed to me three weeks ago when I first came back from the Southwest. There’s another note in it now.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  August 14 [1912]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Elsie

  What a splendid long letter from you did await me here—and full of such interesting plans. And if you are sleeping again you won’t sail all worn out, and if this cool weather holds it will be a help to you. Then, from the equestrian photo—art department phrase—I don’t gather that you are far gone in emaciation. Surely when you are at sea, with such a calm companion as [Henri] Bergson, you’ll get the rest that awaits one on the water.

  Last night Isabelle and I read the Scribners paper aloud with such enjoyment. The way you shortened the Burgundian part seems to me most successful and satisfactory, and the whole paper has such lightness and go about it. Mr. [Edward L.] Burlingame [editor of Scribner’s] wrote me such a pleasant and friendly note about a piece of verse he took while I was in the West. I’ll send you a copy when it is published. Sometime, when you are comfortably settled again, I shall beg you to look over the other “foreign” story I did in Cherry Valley. It’s a cold, chilly sort of thing and would be a dull chore on an eventful day. Besides, it has to be worked over, when I can get round to it. I am delighted that the Bohemian Girl did not disappoint you. The Mulberry Tree is about Bohemians, too.

  Do you know, I’m glad, glad to be back out of the west—for the first time in years and years I’ve had enough of it. It is too big and consuming. I’m glad to lie down among a few books and slowly come to myself again, with all that swift yellow excitement to think of. That pace did tire me out after awhile. Slowly the real meaning came upon me out there of a sentence that I once read carelessly enough somewhere in Balzac: “dans le desert, voyez-vous, il y a tout et il n’y rien; Dieu, sans les hommes.” [Cather’s translation, from the letter above: “In the desert there is everything and nothing—God without mankind.”] That sentence really means a great deal. I was sitting mournfully beside the Rio Grande one day, just outside a most beautiful Indian village—Santo Domingo—when I looked up and saw that sentence written in the sand, and it explained what was the matter with me. Julio was a wonder, but he couldn’t, for very long, take the place of a whole civilization. That’s a stupid thing to say and I’m not really so calculating as that sounds; but you see you can play with the desert and love it and go hard night and day and be full of it and quite tipsy with it; and then there comes a moment when you must kiss it goodbye and go! Go bleeding, but go, go, go! It’s a sudden change, like a norther, and when it comes you have to trek.

  Isabelle and I are having the most peaceful and satisfying days—[Jules] Michelet, tome 9 [of History of France]—and enjoying the emptiness of the city and the freedo
m it gives us. I had such interesting days in the Bohemian town. There is a chair of Bohemian in the University of Nebraska; a woman holds it, a very unusual person [Šárka B. Hrbková]. I can tell you a thrilling story about her sometime. Such a clever chap committed suicide on her account last winter.

  You shall have the letter to Pinker within a very few days, as soon as I get his address from the office. Don’t think of writing to me again until you are on the boat. I shall love to have word of you from there. I’d like so much to see you before you go. It’s a thousand years since March, and so many things have happened to each of us. What a lot of things lie before you just now! I’m so g-l-a-d!