by Willa Cather
I want to say a word about reviews. I know it is your theory that reviews do not sell a book. But some publishers do make them sell books. Several men have told me here that they believed the review of “Java Head” [by Joseph Hergesheimer] in the New Republic sold several thousand copies of the book. I know a number of people who bought the book after reading that review,—I did so, at once,—and they are all people who help to make opinion. I believe the New Republic never received copy of my last book, and Mr. [Francis] Hackett protests, not to me but to people to whom he would speak more frankly than to me, that his attention was never called to it by the publishers as being an unusual book. You remember that after writing you twice, asking you to send a copy to the editor of the Globe, I had to take a copy to Mr. [N. P.] Dawson’s house myself.
One of the cleverest reviewers in New York telephoned me not long ago to discuss [H. L.] Mencken’s review, and remarked that nobody had been afraid to come out and say that this book was unique in American fiction, except the publishers! That is certainly true; glance, if you will, at the jacket on that book; if ever there was a timid, perfunctory endorsement! “We unhesitatingly recommend etc”! No use has been made of the very unusual reviews the book has had. One of the best was lost in a special publication, The Dial; but couldn’t the publishers of the book have got that notice to the part of the public who would be interested? MacMillans thought so, and the same notice was a roast of their book. That excellent appreciation of Brunius, instead of being quoted in some advertisement devoted to the best foreign and American notices of my books, was printed in The Piper (!) with the strongest sentences of commendation and such expressions as “a new and great writer” carefully omitted. Now I don’t want Houghton Mifflin to call me a “great writer”, but why are they so shy about quoting anything of that sort when other people say it? If it were from a delicate literary conscience, I would admire the firm for it, but they do not feel this timidity in advertising frankly meretricious work.
I think “Java Head” has been splendidly advertised, with real enthusiasm and fire. You may tell me that it has not done a great deal for the sale of this particular book, but I know it has done a great deal for Hergesheimer.
This brings me to the real point of my dissatisfaction about advertising. My present publishers print my books and give them a formal introduction to the public. At least one of the publishers with whom I have been talking here believes in my books, and he wants my kind of work enough to spend money in pushing it, to lose money for the first year or two in pushing it. You know that has to be done to place an author of any marked originality. You know that even Conrad was a man absolutely recognized but almost unsold until Doubleday, urged by Kipling, took some real interest and pride in selling his books.
I know that you like to publish my books, but I am not assured that the other members of your firm do. If they do not, they will never do more than print them (the books) and let them take care of themselves. You know the real temper of your colleagues. This is not a business letter, but an appeal to you for personal advice, which will be absolutely confidential.
Do Houghton Mifflin want to publish me enough to put some money into my books, and to give my next novel as many inches of advertising as have been given to “Java Head”, for instance. That book is still being advertised, by the way, while Antonia was long ago dropped out of Houghton Mifflin’s ads.
Is not the Houghton Mifflin mind and heart entirely fixed upon a different sort of novel?
Frankly, I despair of any future with them. I see they have now on hand eight copies of “The Song of the Lark” and four of “O Pioneers”. That seems to me indicative of the cautious spirit in which they have always handled my work. They don’t believe they can make much on me, but they will be very careful not to lose much.
Books like mine require a special kind of publicity work. The New York publisher with whom I have talked most will give them that, and he will let me cooperate with his publicity department. I must give him his answer very soon.
I don’t like to have my books come out in two groups, from two publishers; and I suppose if I go to another publisher Houghton Mifflin won’t keep even four copies of any of my books on hand! But as it is, they never take advantage of the fact that every review of Antonia was a review of my three novels and discussed them all as things forming a group by themselves. The three books are never advertised together as a presentation of special features of American life, as Knopf advertises all of Hergesheimer’s books, even those that are out of print. I don’t care about the cash advance and that sort of thing, but I know I can work better for a firm that can give me some of its ingenuity and enthusiasm.
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
Though Cather’s language above rather vaguely refers to “New York publishers” throughout most of the letter, she was thinking, as she reveals at the end, of Alfred A. Knopf.
TO WILL OWEN JONES
May 20, 1919
New York City
My Dear Mr. Jones;
As to the introductory chapter of “Antonia”: such a device is very often employed by Russian and French authors, when they wish their narrative to be colored by a certain mood and certain personal feelings throughout. It is a device, and since it is, the more frankly it is presented as such, the better. I wished here to present the chief character through a man’s memory, because the most interesting things I knew about the several women of whom she was made, were told me by men. I also wanted it written in the first person, since it was so entirely a story of feeling and not of action. I felt competent to handle a man’s narrative in the first person—a very hard thing for a woman to do—mainly because of the severe training I had in writing Mr. McClure’s autobiography, where I tried so very hard to give his exact impressions in his most characteristic language and with his nicest feeling. In that I succeeded so well that Mrs. McClure and Mr. [John S.] Phillips, his partner and schoolmate, wrote me that it seemed to them a perfectly convincing presentation of him as a boy and young man, and that the sentences themselves had the abruptness and suddenness characteristic of him. From my success in that piece of work, I believed that I could interpret the youth of another man, of a different sort, whom I also knew very well.
The method employed in this story is, in itself, dangerous, and usually fakey; but it was the only one to convey the shades of feeling I wished to convey, and my work on that autobiography gave me the courage to try it. At first I found it awfully hampering to try to be Mr. McClure all the time, but in the end it got to have a kind of fascination to work within the limits and color of that personality I knew so well. Ever since I have had a sort of nagging wish to try the experiment again. In this case the introduction had to state the facts that the narrator of the story is a man of worldly experience,—for only those who know the world can see the parish as it is—, that he has no children to plan for and is not particularly fortunate in his domestic life. If he were, he would not dwell upon the years of his first youth either so minutely or so sympathetically. This, I take it, answers your question.
I am very sincerely glad you like the book. I suppose every serious writer goes through the experience of disappointing and estranging his early friends, and everyone develops as he must and can, not as he would. The enclosed notice from a Chicago paper seems to give a pretty clear statement of what I have been trying to do from the first. My aim has never changed, but in the early twenties one simply does not know enough about life to make real people; one feels them, but one has neither calm insight nor a practised ease of hand. As one grows older one cares less about clever writing and more about a simple and faithful presentation. But to reach this, one must have gone through the period where one would die, so to speak, for the fine phrase; that is essential to learning one’s business.
Yes, I want to stop in Lincoln again and see everybody.
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
On May 23, after looking into the
matters Cather brought to his attention in her long letter, Ferris Greenslet responded patiently to each point, even including copies of interoffice memos and bills he called, jocularly, “Exhibit A,” “Exhibit B,” and so on. He agreed to split the cost of proof corrections fifty-fifty, and addressed the issues of reviews, advertising, and Houghton Mifflin’s ability to produce and market Cather’s work properly. He explained, with humor and grace, his feeling that Cather would not be so hard on Houghton Mifflin if she more properly understood all of the details, and he offered to follow his letter with a trip to New York to speak with her in person about these matters.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
May 30, 1919
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
Excuse my delay in replying to your kind and friendly letter. For ten days now the town has been full of returned Nebraska boys, and, quite aside from the fact that it is a great and exhausting pleasure for me to be with them, they are just now rather distinctly mon affair.
I now feel quite satisfied about the charge for proof corrections. I am perfectly willing to stand half of it, as I think that is an entirely fair distribution. I was right about Dreiser, however, for I have since inquired of his publisher.
Yes, on the whole, I think we had better have a talk about some of these details when it is possible. I have decided not to sign up with anybody until the fall. I am leaving for Toronto tomorrow to spend a month or more with the Hambourgs. Later I may be in Jaffrey for a few weeks later in the summer before I go West. I expect to spend September and October in Red Cloud.
The discouraging thing I get from your letter is that Houghton Mifflin, having already handled my books in the way they think adequate, would probably do not more for them in the future than in the past. I think, on the other hand, that among the people who form opinion, I have a very different position from that which I had five years ago, and that this fact, for a publicity department interested in such things, makes me a very different business proposition. I am also writing better than I was then, considerably better, which at least is a feature in the case. The publisher here of whom I have been thinking favorably, told me frankly that it was a deciding fact in the case with him, and that he wanted “somebody who could do that kind of work and keep it up”, and that my three books, read one after another, had convinced him that I could keep it up. In other words, he wants my “distinction” enough to take risk and trouble for it, while Houghton Mifflin have plenty of distinction, past and inherited, and for the last six years they have been out for quite another sort of bird, in fiction, at least.
By the way, have you read [Grant] Overton’s amusing book on authorines [The Women Who Make Our Novels]? Voila ces dames! He wriggles and lies like a gentleman, and the Worst of the Virtuous Tribe he lets speak for themselves–––don’t they do it, though!
I am returning some of the documents you sent me. Do you know what Swedish firm are translating “O Pioneers!”? Wonderful punctuation! I hope you’ll have a fine fishing trip. Nobody shall see Claude [the manuscript for One of Ours] until fall. He is getting big enough to look after himself. Frankly, I won’t hand him over to anybody who won’t do a good deal for him.
Faithfully yours
W.S.C.
Cather’s humorous mention of Grant Overton’s 1918 book was not incidental: he begins his chapter titled “Willa Sibert Cather” with the claim that Cather is one of the “very few” authors who show “steady and rapid growth” in each of their books. It was just the point she was trying to make to Houghton Mifflin.
That point was, apparently, already made to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In the spring of 1919, Knopf was a young man, only twenty-six years old, and his publishing house had only been in existence for four years. This stood in stark relief to the venerable Boston publishing house of Houghton Mifflin, which could trace its history back to the esteemed Ticknor and Fields, publishers of classic works of American literature since the mid-nineteenth century. The following is the earliest known letter from Cather to Alfred Knopf.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
July 2 [1919]
Toronto
Dear Mr. Knopf:
Thank you for letting me know that you are still interested. The Japanese novel has not reached me yet. It is probably held up in customs, like everything else that comes into Canada. No, you don’t owe me any candy, but perhaps you will owe me a half-hour’s conversation when I get back to New York next fall.
Very cordially yours
Willa Cather
Throughout the summer and fall of 1919, Cather continued to work on “Claude” and to correspond with her friends and publisher. Whether she was feeling unusually confident with the success of My Ántonia or was just testing the loyalty of her publishers, Cather demanded quite a lot of Ferris Greenslet and Houghton Mifflin at this time, even asking Greenslet to get her a tent and to help her with a telephone hookup. She complained that she had to keep writing short stories in order to make a living, and thought “Scandal,” published in the August 1919 Century, an inferior product. She was very pleased about the positive response she continued to receive for My Ántonia, though, and enjoyed learning that well-known writers like Mary Austin and William Allen White were paying her compliments. She wrote the following letter to her mother in the knowledge that it would be shared with her sister Elsie, nicknamed “Bobbie.”
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
December 6 [1919]
My Dearest Mother;
I know I’ve not written for a long time, but I did not mean to be neglectful. I thought Daddy would tell you about me and about how torn up my apartment was. It has taken so much work to get it even a little in order and the way I want it. You know I have no maid this year, and as Edith is away from eight-thirty in the morning until six-thirty at night, most of the housekeeping falls on me. Father will tell you how we are boarding out for our dinners, and you know I don’t like that. Josephine now gets $80 a month; any good maid would now cost us $60 a month, and we would have to send the washing out! With eggs at $1.00 a dozen, and butter $1.04 a pound, we simply can’t afford to entertain any more, and what a servant would eat would be a very considerable item. Mrs. Winn, that noble widow, of whom father will tell you, comes three half-days a week and keeps us clean, but there are so many, many other things to do, and I have been far from well.
I am ashamed not to have written Elsie, when she wrote me such a nice letter, and sent me Marguerite’s letter, too. But I have simply been too tired, Bobby,—the rush of the world has been too hard. But I am coming home this winter, in February or March. I have waited to write until I could tell you that. You see the expense of the trip is something one has to think about, when the cost of living has increased here so enormously, and when I have to go to France in the spring in order to finish my book at all. I expect, Mother, that I have a brother or two who would xxxxxxxxxxx There, I had a burst of temper at the bottom of the page, but I’ve cut it out. It seems extravagant for me to go abroad now, but you know, Mother, that I always have known what was necessary for my work, and that I have been right not to take advice or reprimand from any source about that.
I have thought you were doing pleasant things with Douglass, and would not need letters so much as last winter, and I didn’t want to write Elsie until I could write her a long letter, and tell her how much I rejoice to hear of Marguerite’s [Richardson] interesting life in California. She deserved it, and I’m so glad she has it. Dear Bobbie, I don’t see how you did get on when you were teaching and cooking and taking care of Margie [Anderson]. Lord, my child, it’s a blessing I DID NOT go home then, for you’d simply have had another Margie on your hands.
In addition to painting the bathroom and doing the house work and trying to write a novel, I have been becoming rather “famous” lately, and that is an added care. In other years, when I was living like a lady, with an impressive French maid, I could have been famous quite conveniently, but then I had only to receive a few high-brows. Now the man in the stre
et seems to have “got onto” me, and it’s very inconvenient. The enclosed, on the editorial page of the Tribune, is only one of a dozen articles that have come out in all the New York papers in the last two weeks. People write furious letters to the Sun to ask why their editor has not stated that I am the “greatest living American author”; the Sun editor replies, give him time, maybe he will say that. I have had nothing to do with this little whirlwind of publicity, God knows! My publishers have had nothing to do with it. They are the most astonished people you ever saw. One of them came racing down from Boston to see me, and he kept holding his head and saying, “but why should this book, this one catch on? Anybody would have said it could never be a popular book.” You see they advertised it hardly at all, and I didn’t urge them. I thought it was a book for the very few. And now they are quite stunned.
I’m like Roscoe when he said, if only his twins had waited till next year to come. This is such an awkward time to be famous; the stage is not set for it. Reporters come running to the house all the time and [keep] finding me doing housework. They demand new photographs, and I have no new clothes and no time to get any. Yesterday, when I was washing dishes at the sink with one of Mother’s long gingham aprons tied round my neck—I’ve never had time to shorten it—I heard a knock at the front door and didn’t stir. Then a knock at the kitchen door; such a very dapper young man asked if Miss Cather the Author lived here that I hesitated. He said, “Tell her I’m from the N.Y. Sun, and want to see her on very important business.” I told him that Miss Cather had gone to Atlantic City for a rest! I simply couldn’t live up to the part, do you see? He left saying there was to be a big article about her on Sunday.
Now, at least, Elsie, you don’t have to wash dishes and be famous at the same time. Now, in other years, Josephine and I with our haughty French, thrown lightly back and forth when a visitor was brought in, could have made a great impression on reporters. We made a great impression last winter on the editor of the Chicago [Daily] News [Henry Blackman Sell], who has been my passionate press agent ever since.
