The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  With joyful greetings—joyful because the Mesa Verde exists!—

  Yours

  W.

  When The Song of the Lark was published, in October, Houghton Mifflin produced a special “Cather” issue of their Book News Monthly to promote it and asked if she would supply an article, and also if perhaps S. S. McClure might write a little something. Cather dutifully supplied him with an essay about Mesa Verde.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  November 17 [1915]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Mr. Greenslet

  Here is the belated copy for the Book News. I have not written it before because Miss McClung’s father grew much worse a week ago. He died on Friday and the funeral was on Sunday. So you will understand that my hands have been full. I have even had to give up going to Chicago tonight with Fremstad who has to sing some opera engagements there. I had, however, a glorious day with her in Nebraska, where our trails once more crossed. She had with her a dirty rumpled book which had once been “The Song of the Lark”, and which she said had “not been read but eaten”. I believe Fremstad likes the book better than anyone else does, because she knows just how much of it is her and how much is not, and the why of pretty much everything that is in the book and everything that isn’t in it. I had thought she might be angry, but she only said with a shrug that there was nothing about her that was “too good to be used for an idea—when there was a real idea.” Her enthusiasm was all the more gratifying because she liked the first three books best—especially the first one and the Arizona canyon.

  I am glad, though, that none of the reviews have mentioned Fremstad. It rather belittles a book to tie it up to a personality, I think. Have you seen the notice that says the book is “the story of Geraldine Farrar”?!

  I’ve not heard from Mr. McClure, so I fear he is not to be counted upon, though the enclosed letter will tell you that he is very much excited about the book. I also enclose a nice note from Mr. Ellsworth—who has the worst possible taste in books!

  Yours

  W.S.C.

  Cather closely followed the reviews of the book, which were generally good, if not enthusiastic. Henry Walcott Boynton of the New York Evening Post celebrated it, though, titling his review “The Great Novel Is Only a Dream but a Chapter in It Is Willa Sibert Cather’s The Song of the Lark.”

  TO H. W. BOYNTON

  December 6, 1915

  New York City

  My Dear Mr Boynton:

  It seems impertinent to thank a critic whose opinion one values; but I hope it is not amiss for me to say that your sympathetic understanding of what I tried to do in my last book, and of some of the difficulties that made it hard for me to carry out my intentions, gives me very deep gratification and encouragement. I would also like to tell you that your review of “O Pioneers!” was a very real help to me in undertaking the longer book. In that review you suggested some feeling on your part that the cow-puncher’s experience of the West was not the only experience possible there, and you seemed to feel that one might give some truthful account of life in a new country without pretending to a jovial brutality which, however much one might like to have it, cannot be successfully affected—at least, not by women.

  Very sincerely yours

  Willa Sibert Cather

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  December 7 [1915]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Elsie:

  Miss McClung’s father died three weeks ago, a week after my arrival here, and since then we have been in a half-awake state, which is why you have had no answer to your hearty and cheering letter. I do wish you might have reviewed the book. I’m especially glad you like the Mexican ball—which means the flowering of whatever is feminine in her, really—for before that she is not much more than a struggling mind. I miss the companionship of the character in a degree that is really laughable. In spite of the fact that I had given her a good many of my own external experiences—because they were handy to get at—she remained so objective that I had grown to depend on her companionship more than I realized. So often she set the pace herself, and she pulled at me until I was hers more than she was mine. I would like to feel her stretching herself inside my skin again. Another story that I have in hand seems spineless—a thing I can bully at my pleasure.

  I had the good luck to meet Fremstad in Lincoln just after she had finished the book—she had seen it in Brentanos on her way to the train before leaving N.Y. and had snatched it up. I felt rather as if I had received a decoration after our first interview about it. I had thought she might be furious, but she was glowing with excitement. She declared that even the latter part had the right “stimmung” and said “you might think that it’s all old stuff to me, and yet I know what she was up against and I wanted her to pull it off.” But she said a great many things, which you can hear if you wish; among them was the gratifying remark that it was the only book about an artist she’d ever read in which she felt that there was “something doing in the artist.”

  I always regretted the rather coarse necessity of crowding her out before the footlights, but since the people interested in her were all like Dr. Archie and Johnny, it had to be done. I felt that it was up to me to give her the kind of success that even Tillie could understand, to meet the issue and do it poorly if I couldn’t do it well. I dreaded it from the first chapter on, and spent many more hours in trying to shirk it than I spent in doing it at last. At any rate, I kept within the range of the Moonstone comprehension, and gave them a triumph that they could get their hands on.

  I’ll be in N.Y. after the Holidays. If I run down for a few days before, I’ll let you know. Just now I’m finishing off a lot of small jobs. For this time, goodbye. Take warning: It’s a great mistake to get in too deep with your heroine and set your watch by her; you miss her too drearily when she’s gone.

  Yours

  W.

  I enclose a notice you may not have seen.

  While receiving her own accolades for The Song of the Lark, Cather made time to write a fan letter to Robert Frost, still very early in his writing career.

  TO ROBERT FROST

  December 17, 1915

  New York City

  My Dear Mr. Frost:

  Will you pardon an expression of gratitude from one who is very willing but utterly unable to derive much pleasure from the crackling little fire of poetical activity which is being fanned, so to speak, by a wind off Spoon River? Your two books contain the only American verse printed since I began to read verse, in which I have been able to feel much interest—the only verse of highly individual quality. The appearance of such verse seems to me a very important event, and the warmth of appreciation which it kindles in one is a pleasure to feel. I would like to believe in the whole army of poets catalogued by Mr. [Witter] Bynner and Miss [Jessie] Rittenhouse; but if Ezra Pound and Mr. Masters are poets, clearly you are none. One comes to feel ashamed of being unable to share any of this enthusiasm about “new poets”, and ashamed of one’s desire to ridicule. So let me thank you for the pleasure of admiring your verse,—which is “new” enough and which yet contains so many of the oldest elements of poetry.

  Very sincerely yours

  Willa Sibert Cather

  “Spoon River” is a reference to Edgar Lee Masters’s popular 1915 book of poems Spoon River Anthology.

  TO ROBERT FROST

  January 20 [1916]

  Pittsburgh

  My Dear Mr. Frost:

  I am so sorry that I shall not be in New York on the date of the Poetry Society dinner. It would give me great pleasure to meet Mrs. [Elinor Miriam White] Frost and yourself. I want, among other things, to ask you if you ever happened to meet Miss Jewett. I cannot help regretting that your two volumes of verse came along too late for her to see them. They would have meant more to her than to most people, and would have helped to lighten a deep discouragement. She knew a piece of verse from a piece of Ivory Soap, and she died when none save Witter Bynner and the Phoebe Snow poet
s smote the lyre.

  Of course, the very worst feature in your case is that most of your confreres of the Poetry Society are so fuddled by the democratic idea of “free verse” that they do not know the difference between the best line you ever made and a line from the social paragraphs of the country newspaper. For what can you hope from an audience of people who have no ear to be hurt by the screech of Florence Earle Coates (the worst old war-horse among them!) and no taste to be offended by the “congenial verse” of Ella Wheeler Wilcox? I believe that most of the young offenders are “poets” simply to oblige Miss Rittenhouse. Like every other book of worthless stuff, the Poetry Society hurts the real values temporarily. I’ve never yet dared go to a meeting for fear that I might be tempted to hint at something of the sort. So I shall ask you to regard these remarks as confidential. Publicity is good for poets as well as for breakfast foods—Miss Rittenhouse and her staff may be of some use to you, after all. And their methods do not silence quieter ones. In an un-evangelical way, I’ve put The Mountain, Mowing, Going for Water, The Tuft of Flowers [poems by Frost] and many others, before a good many people who did not have to be told anything about them after they read them, and whose ideas of—well, of anything!—have not changed because, as Mr. Masters writes “the hammock fell [/] Into the dust with Milton’s poems.” (Anthology p188) We can’t all regard that event as symbolic!

  Very cordially yours

  Willa S. Cather

  The Poetry Society of America was founded in 1910 to promote the reading and appreciation of poetry in the United States. “Phoebe Snow” was a character created at the turn of the twentieth century by the Lackawanna Railroad for advertising its cleaner-burning coal-powered locomotives; the ads were accompanied by short poems, like, “A cosey seat / A dainty treat / Make Phoebe’s / Happiness complete / With linen white / And silver bright / Upon the Road / Of Anthracite.” Cather quotes—with minor errors—“Many Soldiers” from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.

  TO HELEN SEIBEL

  January 31 [1916 ]

  Dear Mrs. Seibel:

  I put your letter by for a rainy day; first because it is a nice sort of letter to read on a rainy day, and second because I wanted to answer it when I was not rushed and in a hurry. I have seldom got a letter about a book that pleased me more than this one of yours. You seem to have liked the book [The Song of the Lark] in the way in which I wanted it liked and to have read it in the spirit in which I wrote it. If I had written a preface to the book, I would have said “I for one am tired of ideas and ‘great notions’ for stories. I don’t want to be ‘literary’. Here are a lot of people I used to know and love; sit down and let me tell you about them.”

  From your letter, I judge that you took the book up with just such an open mind, and I am pleased to the heart of me if it gave you that sense of real people and real feelings and places which I seem to gather from your words that it did. I am just answering a letter from an American artist in Italy of whom I’ve never heard who wants to know if there ever was such a “piece-picture” as Mr. Kohler’s or if I made it up. That’s the kind of question I like to answer. I didn’t play any sentimental tricks about that picture, but I cared about it, and so he cared. (Perhaps you know it hung in the fitting room of a German ‘Ladies Tailor’ in the East End, long and long ago. I always felt injured that I could not have had it to look at when I was a child, and this was my revenge on Fortune. It looked just as I say.)

  It was a joyful book to write, I assure you; never a dull day while I was at it and only one long interruption—a month in Roosevelt Hospital from blood poisoning resulting from an infected scratch. That knocked me out four months altogether, but at other times all went well. It was while I was in the hospital that Mr. Seibel’s mother died. I heard of it afterwards.

  You are good to say you have believed in me. I haven’t always in myself. But if I’ve made this little town full of people quite live and real to you, why then I have in a manner made good to you, have I not, though I have been absent for so long in body. I’m glad you still like those old simple things we used to laugh about and enjoy. If you did not like them, you would not like this book. Thea herself is a little different, and yet she is made up out of those same things,—plus one other big thing.

  Please come to see me when you are in New York. I am afraid I shall not be in Pittsburgh very soon again, but I shall hope to see you here in my own place sometime.

  Faithfully always

  Willa S. C.

  TO KATHARINE FOOTE

  February 17 [1916]

  New York City

  Dear Miss Foote:

  Your letter gave me great pleasure—the more because you talk in it of friends bitterly missed. You could hardly say anything that would please me more than to tell me that you think Miss Jewett would like my new book. That was a kind word for you to say, and it goes to my heart. I am so glad that you have taken pleasure in the book and that it has not offended you as a musician. I put off writing the story for years because the woman had to be a singer, and because I hate most musical novels—a compound of a story and a lot of musical criticism which never blend. Even [George Moore’s 1898 novel] Evelynne Innes is such a failure as a novel. I am not a musician and I know about it only what who cares greatly for it may pick up in the course of very busy years. I never heard any music at all until I was sixteen, that means really none, and when I was seventeen I heard an orchestra and a symphony for the first time;—Theodore Thomas and the New World Symphony, in Lincoln, Nebraska. He happens to mention that day and that performance in his published letters to his wife. It was a great day for me.

  So I naturally felt timid about trying to present, or even to indicate, a character and a gift like Thea’s. What I tried to do was to tell the human side of her story, of course, to present it as it looked to and as it affected her friends. My theme was always her “Moonstone-ness”, and what she gave back to Moonstone in the end.

  Please let me know when you come to New York, I do not want to miss seeing you. If you can, send me a line before you come. I shall so love to talk to you of Mrs. Fields. I sometimes think that only one who grew up in the rawest part of what she used to call “our great west” could feel all the complete completeness of her atmosphere.

  Faithfully yours

  Willa Sibert Cather

  I hope to see more of Miss Nielsen

  Antonín Dvorˇák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World,” popularly known as the “New World Symphony,” was played by Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Orchestra when they were in Lincoln during their 1894–1895 season. In The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg hears the orchestra play the Dvorˇák symphony in Chicago, and has something like a revelation: “She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that.”

  Since their dispute over “The Profile” in 1905, Cather and Dorothy Canfield (who married John Redwood Fisher in 1907) apparently had little to do with one another. They occasionally exchanged courteous letters, however, and the one below hints at the hope Cather had for rekindling their old friendship. The review she references is an unsigned one titled “Diminuendo” published in the New Republic on December 11, 1915, which has been identified as Randolph Bourne’s. The singers mentioned in this letter are a list of many of the most celebrated female opera stars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

  March 15 [1916]

  New York City

  Dear Dorothy:

  I’m so glad you had fun with it, and so grateful to you for telling me so. It is a carelessly written book because I had so much fun writing it I could not be careful. Even in the proofs I fooled myself into my own fairy tale and raced ahead. The year and a half I spent writing it—about six months of the time vacation but with the story more or less in mind—went by like a dream. I never had a dull hour with
her—if I’d had to work harder I’d have taken more pains and the book would be a better one. I had a lot of the chapters of the German part written, but they seemed to destroy the composition; for of course it’s all really done from the Moonstone point of view. The German part had to be so different in tone, even in language, that it destroyed my point, though it made a more consistent book. For, of course, my point was not the development of a genius—my point is always Moonstone, what she got from it, what she gave back to it. It is really written in the speech of Moonstone, and when a very cultivated Russian-Jew tells me the English is loose and lacks distinction, he is right. It’s not the purest Ritz-Carlton English that a Continentalized Russian would know at all. The whole book is practically in indirect discourse, quotation once removed. I used single quotes and double quotes until I was ashamed and gave it up.

  Yes, most of the reviews have been sympathetic, but a few high, alabaster brows have clouded with pain. They say they wanted her to lose her voice, or “do something exquisite”, not by any means to go through with her job successfully. I send you the best of these adverse reviews, the only interesting one. He is quite right about the title—its trashy and poor. He puts his finger on another thing. The book is done in two manners—one intimate, one remote. She goes on, but I stand still in Moonstone with Tillie, and I write from Moonstone. That change in presentation was in the very germ of the idea, and my doubt as to whether it would be convincing kept me back from writing the book for several years. But it’s not because the early experience is more real than the later. It’s because the heroine’s life became less and less personal. The early years are the most interesting—they were to her, too. The personal life of singers like [Milka] Ternina and Fremstad arrives at the vanishing point. There is just about as much left of them as Dr. Archie saw when Thea got home after singing Elsa. Of course if you’re doing a gay Geraldine [Farrar], that’s another story. I think the book rather ‘peters out’, but it’s because all in Thea that is proper material for fiction ‘peters out’, not, Heaven knows, because my interest is any less. I think that is a flaw; but I think almost any novel about an artist must have that flaw, for the order of their development is from the personal to the impersonal, when they cease to be proper material for a human story. The last chapters were written not so much for Thea as for Moonstone and Dr. Archie. She had to make good to them. And a singer is the only artist who makes good to Moonstone. Red Cloud people go to Kansas City to hear Farrar and Mary Garden. It’s half art and half natural phenomenon; it’s personal, concrete, a living woman, a living voice there before them. Anyhow, it’s the combination that “gets” them. [Adelina] Patti, Jenny Lind, [Maria] Malibran.