The Selected Letters of Willa Cather
Page 41
(4) As to the date of my return: I will probably sail late in October, but I don’t know how early in the winter I can go west. I am afraid unless the importunate Mrs. Shotwell can be subdued I shall never go to Omaha again! She wrote a letter to Bakst which passes description, asking him what he had to say about my eyes and my nose, how he would define my personality, what flower he thought appropriate for me, etc. As if any painter would give an interview on the physical characteristics of his sitter. Why, the woman must be mad! I’m confident that you and your friends didn’t want this picture in Omaha to give an opportunity for columns of cheap, noisy publicity, and I’m sure I did not sit for it for that purpose. Won’t you be a hero, a very heroic hero, and try to tell this lady that I hate such methods, that I don’t want to be “boosted” in any way, and I don’t like being made ridiculous. The less publicity, the better. When Mr. Newbranch and Miss [Eva] Mahoney [both of the Omaha World Herald] do me the honor to write about me, I am always pleased, pleased and proud. But this sort of vulgar horn-blowing really hurts me, and I know that it offends all people of good taste. It offends my own Father very deeply, and I care a great deal about that. If you will be noble and kind enough to use your influence in my behalf, you might prevent what the diplomats call future unpleasantness.
I dine with the Hitchcocks tonight. I am staying in Paris now, but all my letters still go to my permanent address at Ville d’Avray. Senator [Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska] and Mrs. [Jessie Crounse] Hitchcock went out there for tea with me on Sunday afternoon.
Forgive me for my rhetoric regarding Mrs. Shotwell, but do put the soft pedal on her if you can.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO ELSIE CATHER
August 27 and September 4 [1923]
Aix-les-Bains, France
August 27
Dear Sister:
Don’t let these people worry mother! The portrait won’t reach Omaha before January, or later, as it will be exhibited with other Bakst paintings in Philadelphia and Boston before it goes west.
I know how Mother frets about such things, and I won’t let them put any strain on her. Why, she might worry herself sick over it! She’s no brassy club-woman. So tell her in the beginning, I think it nonsense. If she wants to do it, all right, but there’s no sense in going to any strain about it. If the picture has to be “unveiled”, Mary Virginia can do it, it won’t hurt her nerves one bit! And mother I am afraid would worry about what she should wear, and thus make it a hardship. So, if she begins to look forward to it and worry, just stop her, and tell her M.V. can do this silly business more gracefully than any mature person. It’s so silly, anyway!
Aix-les-Bains
Sept 4
Here I am, my dear, “taking the waters” as the English say. My back had been getting worse all summer, and when Dr. [Lawrence] Litchfield was in Paris for his daughter’s wedding he gave me a going over and urged me to come here and take the baths, which he said are the best in the world for rheumatism. He had been here with rich patients from Pittsburgh. Mr. McClure has been trying for five years to get me to come here, as Mrs. [Hattie] McClure was cured of terrible rheumatism here. Finally Bakst begged me to come and said he would change all his engagements and give me five more sittings when I got back to Paris. (The picture will take 15 sittings instead of 10; they always take more than one expects.)
Well, the doctor to whom Dr. Litchfield directed me here says all my backache is from intercostal rheumatism, and that a course of baths every day for three weeks will cure me. Of course if my friend comes along in the middle of the treatments, then it will delay them and I’ll have to stay longer. It’s hard to be away from Paris, which is so lovely in the fall, but if I can get rid of this continual backache it will be worth a few weeks of exile. The gay, fashionable season at Aix is over now. I tried to come in August but all the hotels were full.
I have a nice room in a very clean and comfortable hotel—no running water in the rooms, but I don’t need it when I’m in a hot sulfur bath for an hour every morning. I get my room and three delicious meals for 35 francs a day, about two dollars! And at Lakewood N.J. last winter I paid $8 a day for a poor room and dreary, messy food! Of course the doctor and the baths will be expensive. All the time one is in the bath, two fine big women gently massage one’s sore back and shoulders under water. Then they play a hot sulfur hose on you for half an hour.
I came down here on the grandest train in France, the Paris-Rome Express, with a private state-room, and it all cost nine dollars, the present fare from N.Y. to Boston! Of course this is all because of exchange; all these things are expensive enough for the poor French. I wonder they don’t hate us, when we can come with our dollars and buy all the nice things they love and have to go without. And there wouldn’t be any nice things if all their sons and brothers hadn’t died to save them.
I just love Helen Louise [Cather] and the baby’s pictures, dear. So does Isabelle, and the Italian cook, who is expecting a baby of her own any day now, looked and looked at it and said she hoped her baby would be like that one. She and her husband have been getting ready for their baby all summer, and a sister came on from Italy to do the cook’s work while she is in bed. Jan is to be godfather and it is to be named after him, if a girl, why then Giovanna.
Goodnight dear, with much, much love. I want to get this off on a fast boat.
Willa
[In the top margin of the last page:] Address me always Ville D’Avray.
Cather’s sixth novel, A Lost Lady, was published by Knopf in September 1923, while she was in France. The critics who dismissed One of Ours—“Heywood Broun & Co.,” Cather called them—now again sang her praises. Broun himself said it was “truly a great book.”
TO CHARLES F. AND MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
[September 1923]
Dear Mother and Father:
If you look Aix-les-Bains up on the map, you will find it around a hundred miles south of Lake Geneva, beside a little lake—Lake Bourget. Long ago, when I used to complain of a sore arm, Mr. McClure used to beg me to come here—I suppose it’s the most famous resort for rheumatic people in the world. The first week of my stay I did not see much improvement, and my writing arm was so badly crippled with neuritis I could hardly write at all. But all through the second week my arms and back have got much better, and I hope the third week will almost cure me. It’s the same old backache I’ve been having for years, and Dr. Litchfield and the doctors here say it is intercostal rheumatism. You tell Carrie Sherwood, and she’ll get Dr. Creighton to explain it to her.
I take a bath every morning at nine oclock—it takes about an hour. Two husky women massage me under a stream of hot water. Then I go back to my hotel, all bundled up, and stay in bed until noon. That’s part of the treatment. But after lunch I am quite gay. I take motor rides or go up the mountains in a little narrow-guage. The French Alps are so beautiful I never tire of them. I love to see the cottonwoods and chestnut trees growing side by side—like Virginia and Nebraska being married! I have found an eager little man with an eager little car who will take me about the country all afternoon for about two dollars. I don’t see how he buys the gasoline for that. I wrote Elsie how comfortably, even luxuriously I live at this hotel for about $2.50 a day.
Splendid news comes from my publisher about the large advance sales of “A Lost Lady”. But I can quite truthfully say that this does not please me half so much as Mother’s liking for the story pleases me. I do love to have my own folks like my stories—I hope the granddaughters will all like them when they are older, too.
I expect to sail the first week of November. Both Dr. Litchfield and my doctor here at Aix advise me not to try a winter in France until my rheumatism is better. The house[s] are all so much colder than ours. Even Isabelle’s house, though she has a furnace, is very draughty and cold in the halls, and there is no heat in the bedrooms. In the spring I felt the cold there very much, and coal is so dreadfully expensive that one hates to
keep asking for more heat.
Now I have just got such a nice letter from Elsie that I must say goodbye to you, dear daddy and mother, and reply to her. She has been such a dear good girl to write me so much this summer and tell me everything I want to know. I know how precious vacation hours are, and I do appreciate Bobby’s kindness to me. You will probably see my letter to her, too, so it’s the same as writing another letter to you.
Now I have written on my manuscript paper, because I can write more plainly on a hard paper,—and all the note-paper Isabelle ordered for me is soft, and I can’t write plainly on it even if I try. I hope you will find this easy to read, dear parents!
Your very loving daughter
Willie
TO ELSIE CATHER
September 19 [1923]
Aix-les-Bains
Dear Sister Elsie:
Both “sat” and “mine” are simply typographical errors, both wrong, of course. They got by Edith and me both, evidently. I ought to have read the book after the first printing for errors, but I really haven’t been half-way well since it came out, and I never dreamed it was going to sell so many thousand before I’d have a chance at it again.
I pondered about the telephone—you see there are no dates given, only the story covers a considerable period of time. I meant the last part to be about 1900, but it might be 1903 or 1904, and I’m sure there were through telephones as early as that. The time element in that story was hard to manage—it has to account for about 15 years before it (the story) actually begins, and about 15 years after it actually ends. The episodes in the story extend over about ten years, actually, but you must be made to feel the changes of about 30 years. So you see one can’t be too definite.
I don’t believe anything I have ever written has given you more pleasure than your letters have given me this summer, dear sister.
Have you seen the full-page ad in the Atlantic? And the nice editorials in the Bee and World-Herald? Judge Vinsonhaler writes me that if mother doesn’t want to unveil that portrait Mary Virginia can do it for her. He is a nice kind man, it’s that vulgar Shotwell woman, friend of Nell McNeny’s! who makes all the troubles.
Bakst has had some quite lovely photographs made of me and him in his studio. Would you like one? They’re quite expensive, but if you’d like one I’ll make you a present. I think I ought to get one for Carrie, she’d treasure it so.
I took a chance on pneumonia yesterday, and went up on Mt. Revard, after being kept away from it for ten days by rain. It was chilly up there, but how magnificent! There had been a new fall of snow on Mt. Blanc, and with the purple clouds driving over it, it was simply overwhelming.
Bobbie, the Paris papers have had such stunning articles about me lately. On my way down to Aix I bought two papers to read on the train, and they both had such nice articles about me. I sent them to my publisher. This is a secret: the editor of Figaro came to see me before I left and told me that I very nearly got the Legion of Honor for Claude—all the committee who had read it were eager to give it to me, but the majority can’t read a long English book. It’s to be translated now, and brought out by one of the best French publishers, and this publisher says I’ll be given the Legion of Honor on it eventually, he thinks [she did not]. All this writing in French papers has been by people I’ve never heard of. Whenever a frenchman reads that book something seems to happen inside him—he becomes my press agent. I wish I could send you some of the articles, but I only see them by chance, as I did those on the train. If I could just get really well again, I’d have so much fun out of all this.
No, I never used Margie’s knife for an ice-pick! I broke it cutting the bones of father’s soup meat, so there! I’m glad Sambo’s alligator died. The Mathenys are getting to be too silly!
I’ve just heard from Isabelle that her nice Italian cook gave birth to a dead girl baby, after a terrible delivery—the doctor thought she would die. I’m so sorry. Bagina and her husband had bought it’s clothes, and bed, and cloak and everything, and were looking forward to it with such happiness. I send you a letter of Isabelle’s about Giotto and things.
No, I never saw the interview about Hochstein at all! It was published in the N.Y. Herald while I was in Red Cloud at Christmas and the entire edition was sold out. Now where do you suppose the Hastings paper got it? Even Isabelle never got a copy.
Goodnight dear sister. Remember, we are going to have a trip in the Alps.
Lovingly
Willa
The article about David Hochstein, the violinist who inspired Cather’s character David Gerhardt in One of Ours, was entitled “Fiction Recalls Violinist Lost in War: An Interview with Willa Cather.” It appeared in the New York Herald on December 24, 1922, and was reprinted in Red Cloud’s Commercial Advertiser on September 3, 1923.
TO ACHSAH BARLOW BREWSTER
November 29 [1923]
Dearest Achsah:
I had a dream-like crossing over a blue sea. There were many nice people on board, the very nicest was Frank Swimmerton, the English novelist, who was my table companion and of whose really charming personality I never tired. He’s so honest and kind.
Since I smoke very little at sea, Edith is getting her share of Earl’s cigarettes, and I saved all your chocolates for her because she likes french candy so much. I’ve told her lots about your exhibition, but I find it impossible to make her understand about your Ceylon pictures, or to tell her what Earl did to the Sailors. Dorothy Canfield dashed in to the boat train to see us off, and I was delighted to see how deeply stirred she had been by that exhibit. She thought your triptych the most beautiful and uplifting of them all.
My love to you both—happy working days to you, and peace of soul.
Lovingly
Willa
A big hug to [daughter] Harwood [Brewster], please, from me.
In January of 1924, Cather received a telegram from the Omaha Daily News saying that people were criticizing the Bakst portrait as “mediocre, valueless, crude, a poor likeness, outrageous coloring, etc.” and asking Cather’s personal opinion. She replied in a telegram saying that she would not make a public statement unless it was to the committee that commissioned the portrait.
TO DUNCAN M. VINSONHALER
Sunday [January 13, 1924]
Dear Judge Vinsonhaler:
I enclose a telegram I received this morning and a copy of my reply. I have been meaning to write you more fully about this matter, but I wanted to wait until after Bakst’s visit to Omaha, as that would give him a chance to explain his picture in his own way.
Of course I am not satisfied with the picture as a portrait of myself; but I think one is not likely to be a good judge in the matter of one’s own likeness. If I didn’t like it, why did I accept it?
Before I accepted it I took two American painters to the studio when Bakst was not there, and they discussed it at length. They assured me that it was a conscientious piece of work—too much so, that he had tried until the result was labored and stiff. They thought all the accessories, even the dress, were beautifully painted, as only a distinguished painter could paint them, but that the face and hands were too labored. They agreed with me that one could not refuse to accept an honest piece of work, even if the likeness was unsatisfactory. When we employ an eminent physician and the patient dies, we pay him, just the same. When we employ an eminent painter, it is just the same. I know several people who have had to take much worse portraits than this one from [John Singer] Sargent, at much higher prices. We know great portrait painters by their successes; we do not take into account the many pictures that almost arrived or utterly failed. A portrait is always a gamble, as we agreed in the beginning. I think this time our luck was bad, but I can at least comfort myself by believing that the result is a little harder on me than on any one of my friends in Omaha who did me the honor to want a painting of me. Surely they won’t accuse me of having accepted the picture out of personal vanity!
I gave Bakst sixteen sittings, and several lon
g afternoons in the country. The sittings were usually three hours long. I never saw anybody work harder, and I never worked harder myself. If he failed to make a good likeness, it was not because he was careless. If I had felt that he slighted the commission in any way, I would certainly have refused to take it, but under the circumstances, I did not feel that I could do so.
Now, on the other hand, had I been Bakst, I would have refused to let a commission go out that fell so far short of being a satisfactory likeness. That he might have done, but he did not. I have resolved never again to have anything to do with a work of art which I can not destroy if it does not suit me. I have a large and commodious grate in my apartment for that purpose. My friends in Omaha ought not to feel about this matter as they might feel if I had painted the picture, or if I had just published a book that had the faults of this likeness. I set out to do a portrait in “A Lost Lady” and I had, I think, better luck than Bakst,—though I am sure I didn’t work much harder. But often an artist does not know when he has failed to get a likeness.
I hope that some time in the near future I can get the time to sit to another painter and get a picture for which you will give me the Bakst picture in exchange. Or if it would seem better, I will so gladly send a check for the price of the picture and cease to worry about it.
May I tell you in confidence, Judge Vinsonhaler, that this unhappy painting has cost me more downright worry and anxiety and distress than any book I ever wrote? I never spent sleepless nights over any work of my own as I did over this. It wasn’t poor enough to refuse, it wasn’t a good likeness and therefore did disappoint. My only hope was that I was really worse looking than I had hereto thought, and that perhaps it looked like me after all.