by Willa Cather
I’m always wonderfully glad to please you, Dorothy. The first letter you wrote me about “O Pioneers!” long ago was the most helpful “hand-up” I had had, and I’ve always kept it and the other generous letters you’ve written me about my books. You know, better than anyone else what a long way I had to go to get—anywhere. And you know, too, the difficulties of the road. It is strange to come at last to write with calm enjoyment and a certain ease, after such storm and struggle and shrieking forever off the key. I am able to keep the pitch now, usually, and that is the thing I’m really thankful for. But Lord—what a lot of life one uses up chasing ‘bright Medusas’, doesn’t one? I think we might get together and compare our scars, like doughboys. I’m not at all fierce anymore—unless you bring a clubwoman!
Your pleased and grateful friend
Willa
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Friday [April 8, 1921]
Dear Dorothy:
It’s foolish for people who have so much to say to each other not to get into communication with each other, don’t you think? Can’t we manage better in the future? You do come to town sometimes, and I’ll manage to get at you if you’ll let me know. I believe we could quite come together again now—and oh how good that would be for me! I know I was sullen and defiant for a good many years—like Paul in “Paul’s Case”, all mixed up—but getting started at my own job has straightened me out inside. Try me on again, and you’ll find I’m reasonable now!
After you left the other night I was thinking about that very time in Pittsburgh, while I was undressing, and wondering how people who had that basic understanding and affection could ever drift apart. But that person who made such a fuss about a story [“The Profile”]—a rotten bad one, of course—was not I, “it was the fool of me”, as the Diamond Mine’s husband remarked,—the wrong-headed and tormented fool of me. Discouraging years those were, you know; teaching all day, writing at night, never getting on. They are over—let’s forget them.
I’ve always kept the letters you wrote me about each of my books. If you had, for instance, written me a discouraging one about “O Pioneers!” it would have frightened me a great deal—and the one you did write helped me a great deal. I suppose its because you know me so well—and so much—that it means so much to me to please you—and because you know “the fool of me” also! I think you over-estimate my “success”, both the inner and the outer. I’ve really a very small public, and, of course, I’m a rather one-sided writer. But those things don’t trouble me if I can have the fun of doing what I like and only that, and can manage to please you and half-a-dozen others.
But what I started out to say was, why can’t we see each other sometimes? We own a considerable bit of “past” in common—nearly all of it delightful to remember. The people with whom one has that grow always fewer. There are years when life is a frenzy—a crazy affair, you know. But now, jamais plus [never again]! I can take as much or as little as I like of several kinds of insanity. A new kind of freedom for me, when the trees grow thin enough so that one can see the wood! And dear Dorothy, let’s see some of the rest of the wood together! There were long years when I loved you very, very dearly, you know—and when one is older that comes back, with a difference, and the new people can’t mean as much. I feel very happy in my heart about you, as if we were going to have a great many lovely hours together.
With my love and gratitude
Willa
I’m off for Toronto tonight
c⁄o Jan Hambourg
38 St. Vincent St
Toronto, Canada
In 1921, the novelist Sinclair Lewis was getting a lot of attention from the huge success of his 1920 novel Main Street and was lecturing around the country. During a stop in Omaha, Nebraska, he told the audience, according to the Omaha World-Herald, “Willa Cather is greater than General Pershing; she is incomparably greater than William Jennings Bryan. She is Nebraska’s foremost citizen because through her stories she has made the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done.”
TO SINCLAIR LEWIS
April 14, 1921
Toronto
Dear Mr. Lewis:
My father has sent me an Omaha paper quoting some very fine and generous things you said about me in your lecture there. That you have read me and like me would in itself be good news enough,—but this downright friendly push from your strong hand, is something that touches and pleases me more than I can say. I would not be at all surprised if your vigorous talk did more to make Nebraska people read me than my own books have done. So I’ve to thank you for helping me to get the attention of my own folks out there. But I’ve to thank you much more for letting me know that you like my books yourself. I would rather have the respect of a few (about three) strong, straight-hitting young writers like yourself than anything else that can come out of the writing business. That’s the truth, and I am therefore very gratefully yours,
Willa Cather
In the July 27, 1921, issue of the Nation, influential critic Carl Van Doren wrote about Cather in the seventh part of his series called “Contemporary American Novelists.” Like many critics after him, Van Doren saw the connection between the pioneers and the artists that populate Cather fiction, noting the peculiar kind of “heroism” in both.
TO CARL VAN DOREN
July 30 [1921]
Toronto
My Dear Mr. Van Doren;
I have been watching with the keenest interest your hair-raising feat of writing about a group of most dissimilar writers, each in his own manner; from the lumpy mountain range of Mr. Dreiser to my own comparatively calm vegetable garden. I am naturally most interested in the article on myself, and I think you have done well and generously by me. I had never tried to puzzle out why my bow had two such dissimilar strings; except that when one lives in the cornfields the people in The Musical Courier look very dazzling, and after one has lived a good deal among the dazzling, the cornfields have their distinct merits. Since you have managed to find some sort of logical connection between these two obsessions, I am very glad to accept it.
The new novel which I am just bringing toward the close is better than the others for several reasons, but I wonder whether you will find much improvement in form. As Mrs. [Edith] Wharton once said; even among good things one must choose, and one must renounce. I chose what I cared for most, and I had to renounce ‘form’–––in any very sound and gratifying sense. Probably, like so many modern composers, I shall always be weak on that side.
Please don’t return my copy of “The Troll Garden” until the autumn. I won’t be home until late in October, and at this season things get lost in the mail.
With my heartiest thanks and warm appreciation,
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
August 26 [1921]
Toronto
[Card attached to top:] It may help you in selection of type to know that the novel will run just about one hundred and fifty thousand words. W.S.C.
Dear Mr. Knopf:
Greetings to you and your lady, and welcome home.
Miss Lewis will see you today, and will deliver a bunch of manuscript to you with explanations. I am hoping that by throwing the first part of the story into type you can manage to get serial publication for it.
I have been able to finish this story much better than I dared to hope. The latter part is now quite as close-knit and as personal as the first part. In other words, I have at last brought it across. I have stayed here and boned away at it all summer, but now it is done.
The press this summer has been extremely good. I hope your people have saved the clippings for you, including the well-placed Nation article.
Now, a sad blow for you. The novel will have to be called “Claude”. I did the best I could by the other title—I lived with it for months,—and I hate it vehemently. It sounds like an Alice Brown title—an evasion, an apology. “Claude” is the only title for this story—any othe
r title would spoil the book for me, and this book is a present I am making to myself. I won’t have it spoiled. Trust me, this story will make its own title. No title could have seemed more unpromising than “Antonia” seemed at first. Scaife said bitterly, “Couldn’t you manage to call it something that people could at least pronounce?” Yet the story has made the title go. This title won’t offend so many people as you think.
1. For low-brows “Claude” is as good a name as any.
2. The high-brows ought to give me the benefit of the doubt.
If Mr. [Joseph] Hergesheimer, for instance, called a story “Myrtle” or “Elaine”, I should of course know he had a reason for doing so. Nobody has objected to “Sir Claude” in “What Maisie Knew”—in fact, it is one of H. James’ most successful names. If he had called the book “Sir Claude”, that would have been nothing against it. It is not a sissy name like “Reggie”—it is clumsily romantic—and that is just what this boy is.
“Claude” is the title, and by that we must sink or swim.
I am leaving for Red Cloud, Nebraska on Tuesday the 30th. I must get to work at once on an article on “Nebraska” the Nation has asked me to do for their Portraits-of-the-States series. On October 29 I will lecture for the Omaha Society of Fine Arts. I hate lecturing, but they made their case very strong, and this lecture opens their season.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
P.S.
1. I have decided to let you use two names (Willa Cather) for me on this novel, and to drop out the “Sibert” for good,—except in signing checks.
2. Since “Claude” is to be the title, perhaps you would like me to name each of the several parts of the story, and thus give variety to the title of right-hand pages. If so, you may use the following:
Book I Lovely Creek
Book II Old Falsehoods
Book III Sunrise on the Prairie
Book IV The Voyage of the Anchises
Book V “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On.”
W.S.C.
On her way west, Cather stopped in Chicago and talked with her friend Fanny Butcher, writer, critic, editor at the Chicago Tribune, and owner of Fanny Butcher Books.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
September 1 [1921]
Hotel Clarke, Hastings, Nebraska
Dear Mr. Knopf,
O.K. to every thing in your letter. I had a long talk with Fanny Butcher about the title, and am again shaken—not as to the rightness of Claude, but as to the wisdom of using it. She begs and implores me not to!
Now, I will be quite satisfied with “One of Ours” [then printed out] “One of Ours,” if you like it. It has merits; it has plenty of “O”s, is euphonious and mystifying—and it is “easy to say”.
Please let me hear from you as soon as you have read the manuscript, as I am very eager to know how it strikes you when you read it altogether—the relation of one part to another and the corresponding changes in tempo were the things I was most interested in throughout this story, and I have never regarded them at all in any book I’ve done hitherto. I can say without boasting that the French part of the story took more self control and more kinds of skill than—well, than most things that are written now-a-days. And the tone does not break once! I do not once “show off” or write gaudily––––and there were so many places where I could have done it.
Cordially yours
W.S.C.
The story is nearer 150,000 than 160,000, I think.
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
November 26 [1921]
My Dearest Mother;
I was so pleased to get a card from you and Father on Thanksgiving morning. I hope you went to Retta’s [Ayres Miner], or had a good Thanksgiving dinner somewhere. I had mine at home, with Josephine to cook it for me! You tell Margie that now I have that nice Frenchwoman back, that always took good care of me. Her two little girls from France have come over, one eight and one ten, and she has her own house to keep. Her husband works, and the three children are going to school. But she gives me half-time; on Monday she comes for the whole day and does the washing, but on every other day she comes at two oclock and works for the rest of the day, and gets dinner at night. So far, it seems too good to be true. She did not have to be told one thing about the house; she walked in after two years’ absence and knew where every napkin and doylie was kept. She was much annoyed because I had put the oyster forks in another drawer, and had put the ice-cream freezer on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard instead of the bottom. She told me when she came that if she found she would have to neglect her own house, or if the children or her father got sick, she would have to give it up, so it may be too good to last. I’ll enjoy it while it does last, for nobody can take care of me and the house as well as she can. She knows just how I like things done,—and she, too, is an artist in her way; most French people are. She respects my work, and I respect hers.
Of course we still have to get our own breakfast, and I make my bed and tidy my room. The only really hard thing is that the ice comes up every other day on the dumb-waiter, and it always comes at eleven, so I have to lift it off and carry it through the hall into the dining room and put it in the box. There is really no other way, though it is hard on my back. You see it takes a quarter of an hour’s fussing to get the janitor to come up from the basement and do it, and cuts into my working time.
Do tell Carrie that I have Josephine back; I know she will be glad. And tell Carrie please to send me Irene’s address, as I’m getting nearly frantic because she does not send me my bill. I hurried away from Omaha, leaving her to pay everything.
How nice you were to slip the baby’s picture into the box, mother! It’s such a nice picture.
Dear Mother, if you have one of those big shopping bags like Douglas sent you that you do not need yourself, I’d be delighted to have it for Christmas. And please send me two kitchen aprons, old ones will do just as well as new, one dark gingham and one white one, for Josephine.
No word from Isabelle yet, but their boat got to France all right. Now Goodbye for this time, dear Mother. I think about you so much, and about how kind and patient you and Father both were with me this summer. I was sick and worried too, most of the time. A sick grandchild and a celebrated daughter both in one summer made a pretty heavy dose for you! I’ll do so much better next time: I somehow know that then I’ll be calm and peaceful, because I know I’ll be better in health.
With so much love to you both,
Willie
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
January 26, 1922
My Dear Dorothy;
I did indeed get a long letter from you in November, but the general crush of things has delayed my reply to it. Even if I don’t write often, its the realest sort of pleasure to me to be in correspondence with you again, and to be intending to write you. Things never should have been any different, and I always felt that sometime we would just naturally touch again. I often dreamed of it, and I think the things I dream of are those I really believe in.
My plans for next summer are vague, but I shall probably go West sometime. I wouldn’t be able to tie myself up to a six weeks engagement, but I might be able to give three or four lectures for the Middlebury school [the Bread Loaf School], which, God help me, I’ve never heard of before! When does it begin? I imagine I am more likely to be free in the early part of the summer than later.
Yes, the novel is finished, and I’m reading the proofs. The last part balances the first, I think, and that is all I hoped for. It won’t be as satisfying as the first, either to me or to other people. Are our endings, in life, I mean, ever as satisfactory or as glowing as our beginnings? I will see that you get one of the first copies, next fall—I don’t favor a spring market—and you’ll agree that I set myself an impossible task, but I think you’ll also see that if there is any “victory” at all in it, it’s a kind of moral one. “Aphrodite” was one of the parties by which I rested myself from the long strain of being so unnat
urally good—a perfect saint for three years!
Have you seen the two volumes of hitherto untranslated [Ivan] Turgenev stories [The Two Friends and Other Stories]? There’s a perfect beauty in one, called “A Quiet Backwater”[.] I remember he speaks of it in one of his letters to [Pauline] Viardot.
I’m so glad for the good news from your family, and that you are well enough to skate. My dear father and mother are well, Isabelle and Jan are having a glorious winter in Paris. I am sulking with a hatred of my kind, just at present; as a result of having broken over my rule and gone to a string of ‘literary’ dinners in New York. My God, the faces of them are as terrible as those in the Musical Courier! Writers don’t have to grin for a living, if they only knew it. It makes me want to hibernate at Five Bank street and wear a never-lifting frown.
With love always, dear Dorothy
Willa
Edith Lewis, a professional advertising copy writer, often used her skills to help Cather with the book jacket text.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
Saturday [February 5, 1922]
Dear Mr. Knopf;
Here is the text for the Jacket. I am sending it to your house, as I am utterly unable to get your office by telephone—you seem almost as telephoneless as I am!—and I am sure you will be at home this evening. Perhaps you will have more time to regarder it there than you would at your desk.
Miss Lewis says that it’s very difficult to write an ad for a story when the author insists that the theme of the story must not be whispered in the ad! Please ask Mr. Spier to have a proof made of this and send it to me, as she may be able to better the text in the proof. And if you yourself have any suggestions to make, please let me have the benefit of them.
