by Willa Cather
Faithfully yours
W.S.C.
All the galley proofs of the novel are now in my hands. About when would you like to have them done?
I look forward to hearing Miss [Myra] Hess on Monday.
By explaining One of Ours to the critic and fellow writer H. L. Mencken, Cather was trying to influence one of the most important reviewers of the book.
TO HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN
February 6 [1922]
Dear Mr. Mencken;
The article in the Sun on “Our National Letters” gave me much joy. That’s just it, when we’re at all true to facts and existing conditions, when we get away from “Old Chester Tales” and Booth Tarkington platitudes, we seem foreign! I’ve often had a deep inner toothache of the soul, wondering whether I was unconsciously copying some “foreign” writer. When “O Pioneers” was written, it was a terrible lonesome book; I couldn’t find any other that left out our usual story machinery. I wondered then, and still sometimes wonder, whether my mind had got a kink put in it by the four shorter novels of Tolstoi, “Anna Karenina”, “The Cossacks”, “Ivan Ilyitch”, and “The Kreutzer Sonata”, which, in paper bindings and indifferent English, fell into my hands when I was fourteen. For about three years I read them all the time, backward and forward; and I used to wonder whether they had so “marked” me that I could not see the American scene as it looked to other Americans––––as it, presumably, really was. I tried to get over all that by a long apprenticeship to Henry James and Mrs. Wharton, and to make an entrance in good society (I mean in, not into) in good company, with [“]Alexander’s Bridge”. “The Bohemian Girl” and the first draft of “O Pioneers”, the nucleus from which it was made, were written before that first artificial novel, but I did not even send them, or show them to a publisher. Because their pattern was different, I thought they must be the artificial ones—real only to me, because I had a romantic and lyric attachment for the country about which they were written. I thought Alexander’[s] Bridge the natural and un-exaggerated book, because it used all the conventional machinery in the conventional way, and so, with pride, I published it. This lengthy confession is apropos of your article, but you may put it in your graveyard as handy for an explanatory obituary.
May I ask you to read a copy of the new novel in June or July, an advance copy? It’s so very different from the others that I’d like to know what you think of it. I might be hit by a taxi-cab or something before you got round to reading it in the regular course of things. It may be a complete mistake, and you would be a good man to smell out falsity, if it’s there, for you are just a little prejudiced against the subject matter, and against the sentiment on which the latter part of it is built–––or, rather, the sentiment by which it moves and draws the next breath. If Claude’s emotion seems real to you,—scoffer that you are!—if his release makes something expand the least bit behind your ribs or under your larynx; then, I shall know that in spite of the damnable nature of the material I’ve got to port before the perishible cargo spoiled. Remember: this one boy’s feeling is true. This one boy I knew as one can only know one’s own blood. I knew the ugliness of his life and the beauty—to him—of his release. He can’t help what went over this country, any more than you or I can. His own feeling was fine; and by an utter miracle one so disinherited of hope, so hopelessly at odds with all his life could ever be,–––such an one found his kingdom; found conditions, activities, thoughts that made him glad he had lived. You see I absolutely know this; some of him still lives in me, and some of me is buried in France with him.––––But the presentation, of course, can make any truth false as Hell, as Mr. Othello said; and the pity of a true knowledge and a true desire is always that it should be so at the mercy [of] the feeble hand,—the hand that very fullness of truth makes unsteady.
But presentation is always a gamble; the road is so rutted with old tracks, we can’t go as we would.
Please save this lengthy epistle and read it over when you read the book. I may be guilty of special pleading, but I want to give this boy every chance with you. And if I’ve done a sickly, sentimental, old-maid job on him, tell me so loudly, like a man, rub it in, pound it down; I’ll deserve it and I’ll need it for my soul’s salvation.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
In addition to being eager to rekindle her friendship with Canfield Fisher, Cather also felt that Dorothy’s deep knowledge of France and French culture could help her with the difficult final parts of “Claude.”
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
February 6 [1922]
New York City
Dear Dorothy;
I hate to bother you so often about this, but I have had a letter from Mr. [Wilfred] Davidson, and the delicate gentleman does not say anything about terms; neither does he tell me which six weeks of the summer his school [Bread Loaf] is in operation. The date would be an important consideration for me. Of course one wouldn’t expect lecture prices for talks to a small number of specially interested students, but I think before writing him I would like to know whether the school would pay my traveling expenses and cover the week or so I would be there. A slow-selling author, who pays little attention to in-come, has to pay attention to out-go, or be in the hole at the end of the year. Now, I am NOT, with tightly compressed lips, throwing your magnificent sales in your face! I’m not a bit sore about being a slow proposition on the market; but I have to cut my plans according to my cloth in order to avoid worrying. Hence, I ask you for light about terms before replying to the Dean.
And now, a counter proposition, in which I really am asking something for nothing:
When the page proofs of my new novel are ready, sometime in May or June, would you be willing to read them over, not carefully and under any strain, but merely as a general reader, and report me if you notice anything that seems to you misleading as to facts, or false as to taste. The last third of the story, unfortunately, takes place in France, under conditions of which my knowledge is not great. I have tried not to pretend to know more than I do. If it got by you, that would mean a good deal. The one character that matters is all right there, I am sure; I would certainly know it if he wasn’t. But some of the things that touch him may be wrong, and at a word from you I could drop an indiscreet phrase or incident.
Tell me quite honestly and unhesitatingly if it would be inconvenient or embarrassing to you in any way.
Yours
Willa
Fisher agreed to read One of Ours in proof, and Cather began sending the pages to her.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Wednesday [probably March 8, 1922]
Dear Dorothy;
Yes, it will be classed as a “war story”, which means it will sell about twelve thousand. And God knows I never wanted to write a war story. I lost six months, refraining from putting pen to paper on this one. But it stood between me and anything else.
It was like this: My cousin, Grosvenor, was born on the farm next my father’s. I helped to take care of him when he was little. We were very much alike–––and very different. He never could escape from the misery of being himself except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous. There were years when we avoided each other. He had a contempt for my way of escape, and his own ways led to absurdities. I was staying on his father’s farm when the war broke out. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years; and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind. I went away and forgot. I no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose; it was all too painfully familiar. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all.
He went over in July, 1917. He was killed at Cantigny, May 27, of the next year. That anything so glorious could have happened to anyone so disinherited of hope! Timidly, angrily, he used to ask me about the geography of France on the wheat wagon. Well, he learned it, you s
ee. I send you his citation. I first came on it in the morning paper when I was having my hair shampooed in a hairdresser’s shop. From that on he was in my mind. The too-personalness, the embarrassment of kinship, was gone. But he was in my mind so much that I couldn’t get through him to other things. It wasn’t affection, but realization so acute that I could not get away from it. I never meant to write a story with a man for the central figure, but with this boy I was all mixed up by accident of birth. Some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me.
It’s a misfortune for me and my publisher that anything so cruelly personal, so subjective, as this story, should be mixed up with journalism and public events with which the world is weary and of which I know so little. But that’s the way things come about in this mixed‑up world. You’ll admit I’ve not been very sentimental, I’ve held the rein tight on him. I’ve cut out all the pictures—I believe it’s ‘pictures’ that I am suppose to do best,—because he wasn’t much the picture-seeing kind. I’ve allowed myself very few accessories to work with. If the reader doesn’t get him, he gets nothing––––not one pretty phrase, not one ‘description’ the old ladies on hotel piazzas can comment upon.
I tried to keep the French part vague, seen from a distance, and only what he sees.
Well, he’s given me three lovely, tormented years. He has been in my blood so long that it seems to me I’ll never be quite myself again.
I am sending you the rest of the story by this mail. I will write you and tell you where to mail(#) it to me. I’m too shaky and worn to go a-visiting, my dear. I want to go to see you when I am a little bit, if not all, there. I will probably leave for Wernersville, Delaware Water Gap, on Monday.
Yours
Willa
#The last part. The part that you now have you will send back to me here, as you say in your letter. The proofs should have reached you last Monday, with my letter.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Monday [probably March 13, 1922]
Galen Hall, Wernersville, Pennsylvania
Dear Dorothy:
I don’t see how you managed to get the proofs back to me before I left on Saturday afternoon, but you did. They arrived at eleven A.M. and I left at four p.m. I wish so much that I could talk to you about them. I know that a lot of people, perhaps everybody, will feel as you do about Enid [character in One of Ours]—and yet there I am just as sure! Of course it happened—it’s the sort of thing one wouldn’t have the courage to invent—and it happened somewhat differently, but it was a part of the original conception of the story. Perhaps it got in because this story was worked out in about half an hour on the train, and this depressing adventure which happened to a Pittsburgh boy I knew got worked into it. But it got worked in because my poor real Claude’s real wife [Myrtle Bartlett Cather] had a gentle habit of locking him out, when she wasn’t going away from him to spend the winter in Florida. She was a lot more Enid-y than Enid, truly!
I know it’s raw—it gave my poor publisher a shock—but it saves an awful lot of writing of the kind I hate to do, that episode. I hate writing about people’s feelings, or their lack of them. And that episode seems conclusive.
Don’t hurry to get the second lot of proofs back to me—anytime next week will do. And just make your comments on the margins of the proofs themselves—that will really be easier for you, and that set will not go back to the printer, anyhow.
By now you know the most of poor Claude—I expect the last part runs pretty thin—not that I didn’t try. I tried just awfully hard. But that’s the fascinating thing about art, anyhow; that good intentions and praiseworthy industry don’t count a damn. If they did, it wouldn’t be much more interesting than bookkeeping. I knew when I began this story that it was, in a manner, doomed. External events made it, pulled it out of utter unconsciousness, and external events mar it—they run through it ugly and gray and cheap, like the stone flaws in a turquoise matrix. It had to be that mixed up sort of thing, or not be at all. If it wasn’t strangled by those external dates and facts and feelings, it would be a good book. But it’s a “my only love sprung from my only hate” sort of thing; it’s the one I love best and can do least for. But do you know; listen: I came off here to this sanitorium in the mountains with those proofs you sent back, feeling so aggrieved that I had to read them now when I am so weak and miserable [from a tonsillectomy], and today I took them out and mournfully began, and read 30 pages. And as truly as I sit here tonight, Dorothy, he got me again! After all this work and worry for these years, after the last wearing six weeks, he got me again, he was real to me again! So you see he must be true.
This gigantic prison is set in beautiful country, just coming green, lovely soft warm air, so that I can work out of doors in a cedar wood. I’m getting better already, though I was pretty sick when I got here. As I read your letter with the proofs in hand today, I felt what a lot I had asked in asking you to read them and to read them so quickly. But I’m glad I asked it, anyhow. It lets a lot of light in when another person reads a story. I’ve kept this one in a dungeon all this while, hoping I could hide the dark secret that it gets into the war. But that won’t matter so much ten years from now—perhaps. Anyhow, I couldn’t help it. The war gave him to me. I never knew him till then. And it gave him to himself. He never knew himself till then. He was—not there! How foolish to keep defending my hero! If I couldn’t do it in three years, I’ll hardly do it now. The queer thing is that someway I care about him more than I did about the others. Even if the book falls down, I’d somehow like Claude himself to win through in spite of that—I’d like to save him outside the book; have him jump from it as from a burning building and catch him in a blanket, perhaps! You see, he “got me going”, indeed!
Goodnight, dear Dorothy, and thank you a thousand, thousand times for the trouble you’ve taken and the heart you have given to it. I’m still not up to writing a long letter, and with hotel pens I can never write at all. When I’m better you’ll hear from me. I go back to New York on Monday, so you’ll mail the proofs to me there. Thank you so, so much.
Willa
I remember tonight—I suppose because the rustic orchestra is trying some Tannhauser, a letter of Wagner to Wesendonck in which he said “Tristan—Tristan—he lags behind, and yet to him, to save him, I would sacrifice all the unborn!”
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Tuesday [probably March 21, 1922]
I can never in this world thank you enough for you letter, or for giving poor Claude so much feeling and sympathy. You say you find just what I tried so hard to make; a narrative that is always Claude, and not me writing about either France or doughboys. No, I wasn’t in France during the war. I went afterward, after most of the french part was written, to see whether, when I read it there, it would seem ‘descriptive’ or impressionistic or knowing. After all, it’s hard to write about a country without description; and I didn’t always keep to the narrow way; the Beaufort part is still too fussy, too ‘picturesque’. But there, you know all the difficulties as well as I do. I am sure you find it better than it is. Someday I want to tell you how I got the material for the last part–––not easily. A great deal of living went into it. But for that matter, there wasn’t any other life for at least two of those three years. There was only one question, ever; “How is Claude this morning? For nothing can be ill if he be well.” And that’s just what one gets out of it; that’s the disease and the cure. But how it drains one–––afterward, you don’t notice it at the time, thank God, you somehow always have enough to feed him till he’s done. But now, life does seem a casual affair. The new one? Oh, it’s an external affair. It’s not Claude.
When the proofs come, I’ll write you again; and thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s now, when I can do nothing more on him, that I need to feel that he matters to someone else, that he can come into the room and make you care about him.
You’ll never know how glad, how relieved, I am that you feel it’s
solid work, under so much excitement. I’ve hammered away whole chapters, and there are still some that ought to go, like that one about the shell bursting under Claude.
You’ve made me very happy about it.
Willa
The following letter may be a fragment, or it may have been included with the letter immediately above; it bears no salutation and no signature.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
[Probably late March 1922]
The proofs have come, dear Dorothy, and God reward you for your comments, for I can’t. There is so much I want to tell you about. So many of your queries will help me to better it.
Yes, the English had independent guns that wandered about, I know the captain of one of them. I could never tell you what work I put in on these details. I got a great deal of it in the hospital here, winter of 1918, when a lot of Western boys lay here in the Polyclinic all winter with no one to talk to and were so glad to talk to me. Such clear, vivid memories come back to sick men. The young captain who killed the degenerate German officer didn’t know what it meant, that was why I used it, it seemed so sweet. He had his wonderful rings etc. I spent a large part of that winter listening to quiet memories,—like that about the terrible little girl and the horrid baby.
For the transport part I had the diary of a New Hampshire doctor who was on one of the worst influenza transports. How that diary came into my hands is a story that would thrill you as a writer. Every one of those episodes is chosen from many, many, which all reinforced it. They nearly all cost somebody’s blood, and they cost a good deal of mine. You have to give out a whole lot to make people remember aloud to you. I saw many, many well ones, too, here and in Canada; but the sick ones often talked like men in a dream, softly remembering dead lives.
