The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  April 28, 1915

  New York City

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  Here is a hasty first cast at the Epilogue, which will be rather casual and not more conclusive than this first draft. I begin to feel as [Robert Louis] Stevenson did about his wife and The Black Arrow, when he waited in vain for it to take hold of her. I have a mournful conviction that you do not get what you look for from this book, and that you find it eccentric and unsatisfying. I would do almost anything to please you, except change the story, which I can’t do. If you feel reluctant about publishing it, there is still time to call it off. I am sure that if you can give it an approving push at the start, it will make its way to a good many people. If it doesn’t, and I am mistaken, then you will have a right to be severe with me. I hate to feel that I am not living up to your expectations, but I feel so much more confidence in this book than I did in the other.

  Faithfully

  Willa Cather

  If you go ahead with this, will you please make a note that I am to have three pulls of each galley proof? I always use two in correcting, and one is to go to a musical expert.

  On April 29 Greenslet reassured her that he did truly feel enthusiastic about the novel, and though he still believed the structure was unusual, he wasn’t the kind of inexperienced publisher who thought every book had to conform to his specific expectations. He did think the three-foot Venetian tide mentioned in a metaphor in the very last sentences of the epilogue was perhaps, hydrologically, an exaggeration.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  [After April 29, 1915]

  New York City

  Dear Mr. Greenslet:

  I am much cheered by your letter. If you feel that way, we’ll pull out with a creditable showing, I am sure. Yes, the tide in the Veneto is only 1 1/2 feet. I was merely guessing. You had best send the Epilogue back to me, as I hope to bring it out a little more sharply.

  I wish you could have been here at a little dinner and theatre party I gave for Fremstad last Wednesday night. It was really a wonderful party. [Pitts] Sanborn, musical critic of the Globe was here. He has written the most penetrating and appreciative notices about Fremstad for ten years, and it was the first time they had ever met. It was like Turgenev’s story of introducing Charity and Gratitude in Heaven.

  Faithfully

  W.S.C.

  TO MISS VAN TUYLL, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

  May 24 [1915]

  New York City

  Dear Miss Van Tuyll;

  In the first place, let me tell you how delighted I am that you get a thrill out of the story, and in the second, let me tell you how I lament the custom of publishing photographs of authorines. I meant to read “Men of Iron.” The publishers sent me a photograph of the author; fat woman with no neck, big stupid face set on her shoulders. I’ll never read it. Now, if I have a prejudice against her type of face, mayn’t hundreds of people perfectly well have a prejudice against mine? I can see it, for actresses and singers; but authorines, for the most part, possess countenances that do but discourage one with their wares.

  If I had some good pictures taken down in the Cliff Dweller cities, I could see that they might suggest a breeze to the onlooker. But I have only those you saw. The one you have reproduced fairly well. I’m going to the big cliff ruins down at Durango, Colorado, late this summer, and could have some taken, but that would be rather late for you, wouldn’t it?

  Now, in the meantime, do you want me to go to Dupont and strive for as good a conventional picture as possible, or do you wish me to have Underwood and Underwood sleuth me to the Park and take me feeding squirrels or doing folk-dances? How can an informal picture be interesting, unless it is taken in an interesting place? I have some rather good ones of me and Fremstad, that were taken up in the woods last summer; but those, of course, I couldn’t let you have, unless I died; then you could come and take them.

  Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll be as compliant as possible. Myself, I think the public prefers to think that authorines are tall, slender, and nineteen years of age.

  Cordially yours,

  Willa S. Cather

  I hope you will put something like the enclosed slip on the jacket of the book. I think a jacket ought to announce interesting subject matter, where there is any to be announced. I thought the jacket of “Sinister Street” interesting—it promised a long sight more than the book delivered, but it made me buy the volume.

  The book Cather mentions, Men of Iron, was actually a Howard Pyle book from 1891. She may have been thinking of the recent success The Iron Woman, which she referenced in 1912. However, the “authorine” who wrote it was Cather’s friend Margaret Deland, a woman who had nursed her through an illness in her Boston home, hardly someone we would expect Cather to think of as having a “big stupid face.” At any rate, she made her point to Miss Van Tuyll.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  June 27 [1915]

  New York City

  Dear Elsie:

  I have just read the mistral article in the Century with the greatest delight! I think it the best of those Provencal studies I have seen and quite wonderful in the way it rolls up so much of the soil and air and breath of the place. It’s lovely and warm and most satisfying.

  I’m still here, bound by proofs which dribble along slowly. Wonderful weather for New York; either green and gray like London, or blue and breezy like Denver. Never knew anything like it here.

  Jack is Morris dancing at Eliot Maine, with Cecil Sharp. He got some sort of scholarship and was sent up from Pittsburgh with five other lads to Sharp’s summer school. I believe they are to help teach it in the public schools next winter in return for their month at Eliot. Jack is simply dizzy with joy. He writes that he’s so happy he wakes up at night and has a terrible moment of fear that it may not be true. He’s shockingly poor, so I sent him some “sport shirts” Saturday.

  When I get a big fat wad of page proofs, I’ll joyfully send them along to you. But the first part ought to be read with no long waits.

  The best and most musicianly musical critic I know is reading the galleys with me, and his enthusiasm is the greatest possible reassurance. We are two-thirds through and so far we have not differed on anything, except that he has urged me to keep in some musical details of her student life which I had decided to cut. In the singing lessons he says that the points are not only correct, but very telling ones to anyone who has worked with voices, in his own phrase “eloquent.” That pleases me, because I got such pleasure out of all the singing lessons I heard. If I’d gone wrong I’d have hated myself! Then, too, the musical part of it is so much disguised as to be very unobtrusive to anyone who isn’t interested in voices. The critic, knowing nothing about the story, was able to tell from her early lessons, just what characteristics I meant her voice to have in later life, and yet nowhere in the early lessons is her voice described or defined.

  This sounds laughably boastful, doesn’t it? But you see it was a very real difficulty, and I’m still panting with relief at having got over it without disaster—until Mr. [Glendinning] Keeble [of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times] agreed to read the galley proofs for me, not one musician had seen a line of it. It was a risky method of procedure, but I wanted to work it out my own way.

  Mary Jewett was so pleased by the article on S.O.J [Sarah Orne Jewett] in the New Republic, and so was I. I sent it [to] her at once. Have you seen article on Mrs. Fields by H. James in June Atlantic? Weren’t you disappointed in Owen Wister’s “Quack Novels”? Oh why is he a rough-neck? When he is really so clever! Well, “Litracher” (I mean lit’ra’cher) is a skin game, and no mistake.

  Yours

  Willa

  Oh my new kakis for the Cliff Dwellers—Just like Kurt’s in Fidelio

  Henry James’s article “Mr. and Mrs. James Fields” appeared in the July 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly (actually published in June). Owen Wister’s “Quack-Novels and Democracy” appeared a month earl
ier in the June 1915 issue of the same magazine.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  June 30 [1915]

  New York City

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  I think the jacket a delight to the eye, and I think the description pasted inside the cover exceedingly good. Better say the heroine grew up in Moonstone, Colorado, however, not Arizona. Colorado has a considerable reading public, interested in local color, and Arizona has not. Also, Thea and Fred run away to Old Mexico, not New Mexico, which would not be much of a run, from Arizona. I wish, perhaps, that a word more could be said about her struggles in Chicago, and a word to the effect that it was the Cliff Dweller ruins that first awoke her historic imagination—so necessary to a great Wagnerian singer—and that there, away from drudgery for the first time in her life, she really grew, all at once, into a powerful and wilful young creature, got her courage, began to find herself.

  I am not wholly happy about the cover, but I shan’t be stubborn about it. You’ve never given me a cover I’ve liked. I’ve only borne them patiently. Have you a copy of the English edition of “Pioneers”? I think that a de-lightful cover, both as to color and composition. Couldn’t you copy that cover for this book? If you have no copy of it, I’ll send you mine. I’m afraid this cover will pain me as long as the book exists. I most heartily dislike it!

  On the chance that [you] haven’t one of the Heinemann books at hand, I am sending you one, along with the dummy. Please send it back to me.

  I think Mr. James entirely too patronizing in his paper on the Fieldses. Mr. Fields was the collector, anyhow. The habit of gathering eagle feathers was superimposed upon Mrs. Fields. She would never have begun it of her own volition, or gone farther than keeping by her charming things that reminded her of charming people. The place was a reliquary, not a museum, and the relics were attuned to each other and had been lived with so unceremoniously and intimately that they had lost their unique quality; they had become, and were, simply Mrs. Fieldses things, and one never felt they were there to be looked at or referred to. I always thought that Jamie, himself, probably made his treasures stand out from the walls a little more, during his lifetime. But Mrs Fields enjoyed their companionship and associations, not their uniqueness. I think H. J. owes 148 Charles street a “solatium”!

  Yours

  Willa Cather

  Please tell Mr. Scaife I will send him the screed he wants for the Boston Herald.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  July 28 [1915]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Elsie:

  I was all ready to sail for Germany this week for Mr. McClure, but at the last moment Judge McClung got nervous about the uncertain situation and would not let Isabelle go, and I did not want to go alone. So I start for Durango August 6th to air my new kakis and things. The proofs are all done. Even the page proofs were somewhat messy, and I thought I’d rather you read the book between covers. I’d like you to think as well of it as may be, and I think it will be more interesting as a book than as a mass of proofs.

  Isn’t “North of Boston” [by Robert Frost] a real thriller? Such individual verse, and all made out of the cold twilight-zone stuff that one has always thought pale matter for poetry. (I don’t, of course, mean the avowed subject matter but the unavowed—Mr Frost’s own mental reactions.) The book is so important and so devoid of splendor. Out of this shabby, ungrammatical new bunch it’s so amazing to find some one who can write verse, and such real, tight, tough verse as it is! Individual syncopation, individual intervals, queer swell in the middle of the line, and then a dreary flattening out of words to off-set it. The atmosphere (the mental atmosphere, I mean, not New England) is a little like Tchekoff, don’t you think? Awfully damp, marshy mind, with June bugs. Lots of cheerfuler things, too. But he’s a really, truly poet, with something fresh to say, and it’s fine that he has come along. I can be more patient now even with the Witter Bynners.

  Achsah Brewster (left) and Edith Lewis in Italy, 1914 (photo credit 4.2)

  You’ll soon be getting hideous postcards from the West. Let me know when you and Miss Goldmark start. We may manage to meet out there.

  Yours

  W.S.C.

  In the late summer, Cather took another trip to the Southwest, this time with Edith Lewis and featuring a tour of Mesa Verde in Colorado. This tour, and especially her discussions with Richard Wetherill, who had “discovered” the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, were deeply influential on the “Tom Outland’s Story” section of her 1925 novel The Professor’s House. Cather and Lewis got lost while touring the canyons and spent several hours waiting for their inexperienced guide to return with help from the camp of Smithsonian archaeologist Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes. Lewis remembered that those hours waiting were Cather’s “most rewarding” of the trip, and the New York Times published an article about it on August 26 headed “Lost in Colorado Canon: Women Editors Suffer as Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide.”

  Throughout the summer of 1915, Cather continued her discussions of promotional efforts for The Song of the Lark with Ferris Greenslet. She felt that Houghton Mifflin ought to play up the cliff dweller aspect of the novel, as cliff dwellers were getting quite fashionable. When the press decided to produce a booklet on Cather herself as part of their advertising campaign, she cooperated by writing a brief autobiographical sketch.

  As a result of her second trip to the Southwest, she considered writing a nonfiction book about the region.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  September 13 [1915]

  Red Cloud

  Dear Mr. Greenslet:

  I think you did a grand job on me in the booklet, and the poster delights me. Thank you for the copy of the book. I am thoroughly pleased with all the mechanical detail of it; cover, jacket, and typography. And I think the text looks interesting.

  I have the most wonderful and glorious photographs of the Cliff Dweller ruins on the Mesa Verde, the jewels of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Collection, furnished me by the general Traffic Manager, who was of great assistance to me in many ways. I also have a hundred splendid photographs of the wonderful Taos region and all the Rio Grande pueblos about Espanola, near Santa Fé. Do you still want a book on the Southwest? I think I could do a good one now. Next summer we might induce the Santa Fé railroad to furnish some transportation, in which case I could run about to some of the more distant places in Arizona and finish the whole thing off, giving the story of the Santa Fé Trail along with the rest. It would be the only reasonably good book on that country ever done. Earnest Pixiotto [author and illustrator Ernest Peixotto] was down there doing a book for Scribners, and he stayed one day at the richest places and merely rode through the others in a motor. He’s a charming man, but he knows nothing at all about the country. Miss Lewis and I met several old friends in the artist colony at Taos, among them Herbert Dunton and [Ernest L.] Blumenschein.

  Please send the copies of “The Song of the Lark” due me to me at 1180 Murray Hill Ave. Pittsburgh.

  If you can send me thirty copies of the booklet and fifteen of the posters, I can place them to good advantage, and please send them to me at Red Cloud.

  In spite of constant climbing and horseback riding in New Mexico and Colorado, I gained six pounds which are a great grief to me, while Miss Lewis lost a few that she could ill afford to spare!

  With great satisfaction in your letter and its enclosure, yours

  W.S.C.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  September 21 [1915]

  Red Cloud

  Dear Elsie:

  Your letter has just reached me, after countless forwardings. Five chunky pounds were the worst misfortune I got out of the Mesa Verde. We had a rough twenty-four hours, certainly, but I never learned so much in any other twenty-four hours, and most of it was glorious. Of course one would never knowingly go in for anything so difficult, no matter what the possible rewards, so it was good luck to have it thrust upon one, since we didn’t break any bones. If
we had had such a mischance I don’t see how the men would have got us out in a week’s time. It is the worst canyon in Colorado—I believe there are some in Utah even worse. I was on my horse again four days afterward, and I want to go right back into that canyon and be mauled about by its big brutality, though all my bruises are not gone yet. It’s a country that drives you crazy with delight, and that’s all there is to it. I can’t say anything more intelligible about it.

  Mr. G. has sent me an advance copy of my book; an example of the worst proof-reading I’ve ever seen. Mostly my fault, of course, but the Riverside Press is surely not blameless. “The beauty born of murmuring sound” appears “the music born of etc.” I don’t doubt it was so in the copy, but a proofreader ought to justify quotations [the phrase is a quotation from William Wordsworth]. There are a lot of others, quite as amusing. I am going to adopt a more sober method of composition, and I’ll never hurry a book again. The result is too untidy. All Mr. Greenslet’s work—cover type, etc.—is very satisfactory. The carelessness is mostly up to me.

  I got a lot of glorious photographs in the Southwest—most of them belong to the President of the Denver & Rio Grande, but I hope I can show them to you before I send them back to him. They are the pick of hundreds of attempts; in that light, and before such heights and depths the camera becomes inarticulate—it stutters and it raves. What that country waits for is a painter, but he’ll have to be a big one, with an egotism as big as the Cliff Dwellers’ was. Otherwise he’ll only do colored photographs.

  Have you seen [Robert Frost’s] “A Boy’s Will” Elsie? I like it better than “North of Boston”, a good deal better. Let me hear how my messy book strikes you when it comes along. I’m not a little anxious! Now as I read it over, I wonder why it was so much work!