by Willa Cather
Please take the enclosed notices to Dr. Tyndale. He is so old and full of dope, poor dear, he can’t take in much, but if you read them to him, he’ll understand. He deserves to get any wedding cake there is coming. The truth is, everything in his life has failed—but me.
These facts are for you alone. So far Knopf has sold 15,000 copies. He has 18,000 more ready at the factory in case booksellers re-order. If they do not re-order, he’ll be badly stung. He spared no expense to make a handsome book. He was here yesterday and is as plucky as can be; says he’s willing to go bust on it. I get 37¢ on each copy sold. Sinclair reviews it—as a failure—in tonight’s Post. “Why the devil should a woman write a war book?” Well, why should she? This one was “put upon me” I didn’t choose it. Don’t try to read Lewis’s review to Dr. Tyndale—he couldn’t understand it, but do read him Zoe’s and the two by Burton Rascoe. I’ll send you Heywood Broun’s roast as soon as I can get a copy—I’m in bed with my friend, superintending the housecleaning, and not in a very “literary” mood. I got back only yesterday and am not even unpacked. Have seen no one but Knopf, but find a host of letters and telegrams, expressing either the warmest congratulations or the saddest regret!
Write soon, Bobbie, to your loving sister,
Willie
The following was written to an acquaintance from Cather’s days in Pittsburgh.
TO ELIZABETH MOORHEAD VERMORCKEN
Tuesday [September 19, 1922]
New York City
[Written in above salutation:] Josephine is back and we are struggling to get the house clean and to keep the Pacifists from eating us up!
Dear Elizabeth:
I returned from New Brunswick only yesterday, to find that you had been in town again and that I had missed you. I am delighted that you like “Claude,” however. I’ve never tried to do anything that took so much out of me; nor anything that was so absorbing and exciting to do. I miss it terribly—terribly! It determined almost every action in my life for so long that now I hardly know where to turn. The Pacifists have come at me like a swarm of hornets. It’s disconcerting to have Claude regarded as a sentimental glorification of War, when he’s so clearly a farmer boy, neither very old nor very wise. I tried to treat the War without any attempt at literalness—as if it were some war away back in history, and I was only concerned with its effect upon one boy. Very few people seem able to regard it as a story—it’s friends as well as its foes will have it a presentation of “the American soldier”, whereas its only the story of one. I wanted to call it merely “Claude” but the publisher and everyone else was against me. However, I do think its a good book and that it will live through the controversy as an imaginative work and not a piece of reporting.
Hastily
W.S.C.
[Included with letter above:]
Tuesday
I wrote this note yesterday, lost it in the mass of things on my desk, and have just found it. So you get two! W—
Monday
Dear Elizabeth:
I got home from New Brunswick only last night, so I’ve missed you altogether. But it was a delight to find your letter. I am so glad you liked it—Claude, I mean. For the present he seems to have no existence as a story, but as an expression of opinion about war! My desk is filled with letters from Pacifists: one tells me that I will be forever-more “a woman stained with Crime”! Apparently, if a story touches the political opinion of people, they can’t see it as an imaginative thing at all. It’s as if a pianist, in the middle of a sonata, began to play “The Watch on the Rhine”—in war time! Everyone forgets he was playing a sonata!
Hastily and affectionately
Willa
TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT
October 4, 1922
Central Park, New York City
[Written in the top margin:] I’ve telephoned the office to send you a copy of Claude anyhow!
Dear Elsie:
It’s certainly a disgrace to me if you’ve had to send to Brentano for Claude! But I’ve been driven to death—and only knew your whereabouts from your letter. The day it came I had tea with the Will Whites—aren’t they nice, and jolly? And both of them are such good friends of yours. We had a friendly time and he teased me a lot about being kicked out by my highbrow friends: “When thy [George Jean] Nathan and thy Mencken forsake thee, then the Lord Will take thee up.”
I told him Claude didn’t mind—he likes a row, always did! Almost every day there’s a letter for or agin in some paper. Mencken—Freeman—Liberator—Dial etc all say that now I write exactly like the Ladies Home Journal, and that’s the place for me anyhow. The New Republic lives up to my impression, I think. They give me a paragraph at the end of a lengthy review of—Kathleen Norris!
The book is selling quite amazingly. For the last week it has sold ahead of “Babbitt” [by Sinclair Lewis] and “This Freedom” [by A. S. M. Hutchinson] in Chicago and Minneapolis. I don’t know about other cities, but I have official returns from those two.
You seem to have a great deal more literary news in N.M. than there is in N.Y. Here there is none—except Galsworthy’s new Jew play, “Loyalties”. So interesting and well acted—no emotion in it, but so well-made and well-bred. Why is he such a gentleman in his plays and such an—an old maid in his novels! I sat and looked at his handsome head all evening and wondered. He was penned in between two very fat Jewesses, and it was a boiling hot night. At the end of it, I wondered whether he would like to touch the text up a little!
It looks as if Claude might do something handsome for his Ma. And then the critics will be quite sure! The Dial-Freeman-Liberator say its a change in the brain tissue that has come quite suddenly; I simply can’t write anymore—it is now mere cataloguing and without life or thrill of emotion in it. Well, now I know where I get off—and I surely know where they do!
They simply can’t recognize writing unless it has all the usual emotional signs—H. [Heywood] Broun says there’s not five minutes of interesting reading in the book. I’ve just begun to learn how to write in this book, and I’m going right on!
Yours
W. S. C.
In November 1922 Cather wrote a review of M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s Memories of a Hostess, about Annie Adams Fields, for the December Atlantic Monthly. In the four years since she wrote her aunt Franc a letter trumpeting the end of the war and “a world in which not one great monarchy or tyranny existed,” Cather’s sense of the war’s legacy had changed dramatically.
TO ELLERY SEDGWICK, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
November 17, 1922
New York City
My dear Mr. Sedgwick:
I am delighted that you liked the article about Mrs. Fields. It was hastily done, but I think that no one who knew her could touch that subject at all without trying to remember her as she was.
I am so sorry you have been ill. I think these last few years have been hard on everyone. It seems to me that everything has gone wrong since the Armistice. Why they celebrate that day with anything but fasts and sack-cloth and ashes, I don’t know.
Thank you most heartily for your letter. I shall be so pleased if all Mrs. Fields’ friends feel about the article as you do. Perhaps some day when you are quite well and I have a little leisure, you will want me to do something about Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett for the Atlantic.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO MR. JOHNS
November 17, 1922
New York City
My dear Mr. Johns:
How splendid of you to write me that nice letter! And I can’t tell you how glad I am that you like Antonia and Claude. You wouldn’t have made a bad Sherlock Holmes. You are the first sleuth who has dug the Parsifal theme out of Claude Wheeler—and I thought I had buried it so deep—deep! Yet, all through the first part of the book, I kept promising myself that I would put “The Blameless Fool, by Pity Enlightened” on the title page, where I eventually put a line from Vachel Lindsay. Now, either you or I did pr
etty well, when the theme got through to you out of absolute and consistent reticence.
I am going West next week to be gone until about the middle of January, but then I shall be home on Friday afternoons until I sail for France in March. Won’t you and Mrs. Johns please try to come in often on Fridays? You are such near neighbors now that it ought to be easy, and I enjoyed seeing you so much when you were here before.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Parsifal, an opera by Richard Wagner, was first performed in 1882.
Throughout 1922, while Cather was preparing for the publication of One of Ours, she was also writing her next novel, A Lost Lady. Shortly before she wrote the following letter, she received one from Knopf telling her that his “enthusiasm” for A Lost Lady, which he had read in manuscript, was “limitless” and that, though the novel was short, it should be published alone. He commented wryly, “You ought to be restrained by law, if necessary, from publishing this book with anything else.”
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
Tuesday [November 21, 1922]
Dear Mr. Knopf:
It surely does help one along to publish with people who can like a thing for what it has got, and not just feel nervous and anxious because it hasn’t the Rex Beach quality—as nice Ferris Greenslet always felt. If it was “Western” then it ought to be Rex Beachy and rough-house. He never saw what was there, only what wasn’t, and whistled to keep up his courage. What I want to do is to find a few qualities, a few perfumes, that haven’t been exactly named and defined yet. And if I have a publisher who is interested in new tastes and smells, I can go a good way toward finding them. This story [A Lost Lady] is an example of what I mean; it’s a little, lawless un-machine made thing—not very good construction, but the woman lives—that’s all I want. I don’t care about the frame work—I’ll make any kind of net that will get, and hold, her alive.
Of course, if you can get serial publication, I would like it because of the money. The more expert personal service I can afford to pay for, the more I can write. If I can find and afford a really competent secretary, that will help a great deal. On the other hand, I don’t want to delay publication too long. I am beginning to be awfully weary of the hoot-owl legend that it takes me three years to write a book. I’ve no drive to do stunts, but I don’t wish to get into a three-year habit. It depends on the kind of book. I think you had better use your best judgment about serialization. Why not offer it to someone who will pay well and see if he’ll make an offer? If we had an offer, we could decide. I confess to a shudder where the magazines are concerned. But serialization is supposed to be good advertising, isn’t it, as well as good pay? You will be leaving tomorrow, but perhaps I can manage to talk this over with Mrs. Knopf before I go.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
The news about “One of Ours” is simply splendid!
The following is a reply to the head of the New York Public Library, who had inquired about the long-ago book The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. Throughout her life, Cather received many inquiries about her work on the book, which bore Georgine Milmine’s name as author.
TO E. H. ANDERSON
November 24, 1922
New York City
My dear Mr. Anderson:
I am just hurrying off for the West to spend Thanksgiving with my mother and father, but I will try to answer your questions briefly.
1. There was a Georgine Milmine, now Mrs. Benjamin Wells, of Aubrey, New York, a Canadian newspaper woman, who spent years in getting together a great deal of material relating to Mrs. Eddy’s life and the history of Christian Science.
2. Mr. McClure bought her material and notes. There was an enormous amount of it; cuttings from newspapers of forty years ago, court records, early editions of “Science and Health” now absolutely unobtainable. It was a splendid collection of material and after Mr. McClure sold the magazine to a perfectly irresponsible young man named [Frederick] Collins, this was all scattered and lost—a first edition of “Science and Health” thrown away with junk.
3. From the first, Miss Milmine admitted that she hadn’t sufficient technical ability to combine all her evidence and produce a biography. Mr. McClure tried out three or four people at writing the story. It was a sort of competition. He liked my version the best chiefly because it was unprejudiced—I haven’t the slightest bone to pick with Christian Science. This was when I first came to New York, and that piece of writing was the first important piece of work I did for magazines. After I finished it, I became Managing Editor.
4. A great deal of time and money were spent on authenticating all the material, and with the exception of the first chapter, I think the whole history is as authentic and accurate as human performances ever are. All the letters and documents quoted are absolutely authentic, and in every case, we either had or personally copied the original documents–––the first chapter, however, I did not write. It was written by Burton J. Hendrick, who has now an important position with Doubleday. Mr. Hendrick was very much annoyed at being called off the job and never forgave Mr. McClure. Hendrick is an accurate writer, but much of the first chapter—especially the first part of it—frankly deals with legend—with what envious people and jealous relatives remember of Mrs. Eddy’s early youth. It was given for what it was worth, but I always consider such sources dubious.
5. Undoubtedly, Doubleday has perfectly good business reasons for keeping the book out of print. There has been a great demand for it to which he has been consistently blank. You see nobody took any interest in its fate. I wrote it myself as a sort of discipline, an exercise. I wouldn’t fight for it; it’s not the least in my line. Miss Milmine, now Mrs. Wells, is in the awkward position of having her name attached to a book, of which she didn’t write a word. I am only sorry that the splendid collection of material, from which the story was written, was lost and destroyed.
Now this is absolutely confidential, Mr. Anderson. I have never made a statement about it before, in writing or otherwise. I suppose somebody ought to know the actual truth of the matter and so long as I am writing to you about it, I might as well ask you to be the repository of these facts. I know, of course, that you want them for some perfectly good use, and will keep my name out of it.
With my heartiest greetings to Mrs. Anderson and yourself, I am
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. AND BLANCHE KNOPF
Sunday night [1922?]
My Dear Friends;
A wine for princes, simply that! And one I had never tasted, though I’ve been in the South a lot. I have been laying the foundation of a long friendship with it tonight. It’s soft as a purple butterfly wing.
The case arrived on Friday. For the first time in history Josephine came bursting into my room and into my afternoon nap, like a joyful elephant. Her husband had been in that Rothschild vineyard many times, because two of his friends worked there. I had the size and history of the vineyard pretty well ground into me before I could get to the invaluable Martin Strand. It is a superb wine, and shall be reserved for special occasions when I feel a little hard and want to have a glow put into things, a kind of stained glass treatment of pallid daylight.
Gratefully, your fortunate
Willa Cather
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
December 4 [1922]
Dear Mrs. Knopf:
How good you are to me! The beautiful basket of fruit kept me company all the way home, and I hadn’t eaten it all at the end of the journey. I had a splendid trip, beautiful golden weather, and I am writing this on the front porch in a blaze of sunlight under a fierce blue sky. Tomorrow is my Father’s and Mother’s golden wedding day; all my sisters and brothers are at home and we are having a very jolly time. Both my parents are simply incredibly young to be having such a celebration. They drive a hundred miles in their car any day and are not tired the next. I have to take a nap after lunch, but neither o
f them ever do, not much!
It’s always a joy to be back here—I get more thrills to the square mile out of this cornfield country than I can out of any other country in the world.
A thousand thanks and my loyal friendship to you both.
Yours always
Willa Cather
PART SEVEN
Years of Mastery
1923–1927
I do hope you’ll like my Archbishop, Fanny.… It’s an altogether new kind for me, but how I loved doing it! It was as if one had always played modern composers, and at last had the time and control to practice Bach awhile. Modest comparison!
—WILLA CATHER TO FANNY BUTCHER, October 27, 1926
Willa Cather with Léon Bakst in his studio, Paris, 1923. Photograph by Henri Manuel (photo credit 7.1)
CATHER WAS NOW at the height of her powers and the pinnacle of her career. After a bout with the flu in early 1923, she went to France for a long visit with Jan and Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who had settled in a house near Paris. Soon after her arrival she received word that she had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. The year 1923 also saw the publication of A Lost Lady, sometimes considered Cather’s masterwork. Three more of her finest books—The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes for the Archbishop—followed in 1925, 1926, and 1927. She often said that the writing of Archbishop was such a pleasure that it was like a vacation. In the same otherwise satisfying year as its publication, however, Cather was forced to leave her comfortable apartment on Bank Street.
