by Willa Cather
Now I want you to show this letter to such interested persons as you may see fit; to such as have bowels of compassion and some imagination, and who know how difficult it sometimes is to divine the right line of conduct. Your people meant so well, and I meant so well,—and I insist that Bakst meant so well! Mercy, how hard he and I did work, those grilling-hot summer days! Beg all your committee to sit for portraits, quickly, and then they will judge me mercifully!
Mournfully but faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO ACHSAH BARLOW BREWSTER
February 16 [1924]
Dearest Achsah;
We are having such an interesting and happy winter—lots of nice people, and music, and flowers, and Montana’s turning out to be a splendid maid. I’m working hard and with great joy, and I’m well and not anguished and perplexed as I was nearly all the time in Paris. Did Edith tell you that her company [the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm] gave her a check for a thousand dollars for a Christmas present, and a month later raised her salary again! You have to deliver goods to make a New York business firm treat you like that, I assure you. Both Claude and a Lost Lady keep right on selling, so we’re indulging ourselves in lots of little luxuries and not splurging. It’s so good to be at home again Achsah, and I know you are saying the same thing in your heart every day. I use your wonderful vaporizor for my nose every day, and bless you for it—it’s as useful in a New York climate as in that of Paris.
Give my love to Earl and Harwood and tell her we love the cards she sent up. How fine life is, when one does not fret about silly things, dear Achsah!
Lovingly
W.S.C.
In early 1924 Ferris Greenslet asked Cather if she would be interested in compiling a collection of Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories with a “critical and appreciative” preface. He intimated that Jewett’s sister, Mary, was also enthusiastic about the idea.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
February 17 [1924]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
Yes, I’d much rather do this than make my fortune at the various lucrative commissions that are constantly pressed upon me.
In the first place I must ask you send me down a complete set of the books, the original edition. The safest way is for me to cut them up myself and bind them up into volumes in the sequence that seems best.
The first volume, of course, would take in all the Pointed Fir sketches, including “The Queen’s Twin”, “A Dunnet Shepherdess”, and “William’s Wedding”. The second volume, if one took only the very best, would be an equally fat one. “Deephaven” is charming, but I don’t think it belongs with Miss Jewett’s best mature work.
The librarian at the branch library round the corner tells me that the young intellectuals of Greenwich Village sometimes ask vaguely for “some of Sarah Jewett’s books”, but when she produces volumes like “The White Heron” they finger them, say they look like children’s books, and leave them on the desk. She thinks their physical appearance is much against them with this generation. I rather love those dumpy little books myself, but if you are going to make an appeal to the reading public of today I think the stories ought to have a fresh envelope and be issued in standard-size volumes with good clear type,—(I would suggest type like that you used in “Antonia”)—some type that does not look like text-book type. I don’t mean that I think the books ought to look loud, naturally, but modern.
If you send me down the books at once I will get to work in any spare moments I have. You can be setting the new volumes while I do the introduction. And, by the way, I do wish you would come to see me sometime when you are in town.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
Mrs. Knopf has just sold the movie rights of “A Lost Lady” for me for twelve thousand.
Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is set in the fictional Maine village of Dunnet Landing. The other stories mentioned share the same setting.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
February 27 [1924]
My Dear Dorothy:
Your letter came at the happiest time for enjoying letters—I was, and still am, in bed: partly because of a stiff neck, and partly because I saw that a stiff neck would let me out of three dreaded pleasures; a song recital by an old friend, the first night of an old friend’s play, and a literary dinner. Your letter came just when my splendid darkey maid was bringing in my tea, and it made a tea-party for me. How I have enjoyed these days in bed! You remember when I was a youngster I couldn’t bear solitude at all—and now I can bear about nothing else: Isabelle has written me all about your mother, and I rejoice in her activity. I’ve written my mother all about her. By this boat I’m sending Isabelle an account of how they crowned my photograph with a “laurel wreath” in Red Cloud! I’m just childish enough to be awfully pleased. It means I’ve kept their affection, really.
I’m so glad you remember our walk and our morning in Paris with pleasure—I do, with deep pleasure and gratitude. I wish I could have been with you all in Switzerland. I’d love that.
Oh, I’ve read [Joseph Collins’s] “The Doctor Looks at Literature,” and I delight in it—especially the chapters on [D. H.] Lawrence and [Marcel] Proust. Do read Mme. [Marie] Curie’s life of her husband [Pierre Curie], and the admirable sketch of her own life, Dorothy.
All winter I’ve been getting the nicest love letters from young boys. I’ve begun to save them—they are quite different from other admiring-reader-letters. I suppose actresses get a great many such, but I don’t believe writers often do. In my college days it was the girls, not boys who wrote to authors.
No, Bakst doesn’t spoil my life anymore—though he did cloud a good many months of it. Mother is the one worst hit, poor dear! She goes on moaning as if I’d done something disgraceful myself! Sure, it’s like the Purple Cow—I’d rather see than be one. But she won’t consider it that way.
I’m beginning to select material for a new collection of Miss Jewett, in accordance with a promise made years ago. Houghton Mifflin are so anxious to prevent me from producing copy for Knopf that they are even willing to spend a little money on Miss Jewett, if they can distract me from other activity!
Poor Knopf, anyhow! Just when he has got his booksellers where they can sell most any old book I do about the West, I refuse to have anything to do with the West, but have gone charging off on certain stories of embarrassing length—or shortness—that have nothing to do with locality—or geography whatever! My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people—especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It’s a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers. That’s the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn’t my secret any more.
Write me again, dear Dorothy. It gives me so much pleasure. Now my stiff neck—I really have one—rebels at a writing posture, and I must stop. With my love to you and my blessing on you all.
With my love
Willa
Is your yellow cat a Tom or a lady? I took a great fancy to her—or him, and I’d like to know.
The novel Cather published after A Lost Lady, the new writing she seems to be referring to in the penultimate paragraph, was The Professor’s House.
In the spring of 1924, Burton Rascoe, a sort of literary gossip columnist, published a column about Cather in which he quoted Cather as saying, “Sarah Orne Jewett was too much cuddled by her family. They’d have kept her in cotton wool and smothered her if they’d had entirely their own way about it. She was a very uneven writer. A good portion of her work is not worth preserving.” Jewett’s family read this when it was republished in the Boston Transcript and were quite angry, but Greenslet and Cather demonstrated that it was a case of inaccurate, careless journalism, and the Jewett family was mollified.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
April 15 [1924]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
These are rather frantic days for me. An old friend has been
very ill. Now my maid is ill, and I swing like a pendulum between my desk and the kitchen, and taxi (what a verb!) about New York for food. None the less, I have begun the Introduction. When it is finished I shall send it to Miss [Mary] Jewett for her approval. If there is anything in it she does not like, I will do all I can to mend it. I do not want her to have any more care or worry; I want to please her in this undertaking if it is within my power.
No, we have not been too hard on Burton Rascoe. He has caused both me and Miss Jewett the kind of heartache that is very hard to bear. It took more out of me than many an illness has. I understand that a garbled version of the same luncheon party was written by him for a small magazine [Arts and Decoration], with many offensive statements about me, supposed to be complimentary. I have not seen it, and do not want to.
Did the Transcript ever publish Thomas Beer’s letter? Or a letter written them by Professor [Herbert] Bates, one of the men who heard my talk at Columbia? If not, it was very dishonest of that paper.
I inclose a list of the stories which I think would be the best ones to use in the second volume,—which I beg you to send Miss Jewett, along with this letter. I would write to her if I were not so driven.
As I told you, I think the last edition of the “Pointed Fir” stories can stand as it is, for the first volume, with a slight change of paging; I would strongly suggest that “The Queen’s Twin” be placed between “A Dunnet Shepherdess” and “William’s Wedding,” both to suggest the passage of time, and to make less obvious the difference in treatment of William and Esther in the two stories,—the latter, of course, is something paler than the former, as it did not have that final clarifying touch by the writer’s hand.
If Miss Jewett will only trust me, I will do my best.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
Stories suggested for volume II
1. The White Heron
2. The Flight of Betsey Lane
3. The Dulham Ladies
4. Going to Shrewsbury
5. The Only Rose
6. Miss Tempy’s Watchers
7. Martha’s Lady
8. The Guests of Mrs. Timms
9. The Town Poor
10. The Hiltons’ Holiday
11. Aunt Cynthia Dallet
Mr. Greenslet;
What about a title, a collective title, for the two volumes? How would something like “The Riverside Collection of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Stories” do? Some title like that, but better.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
May 10 [1924]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
I do beg you not to use the [Elizabeth] Fairchild sonnet! As the tribute of a friend, even, it is not convincing, because it is so full of artificial, colorless phrases. Many a college undergraduate could do better. The sonnet is distinctly third rate as poetry. I had hoped that this would be an edition of Miss Jewett for writers. If Mme. [Olga Knipper] Tchekova, or [D. H.] Lawrence, or [John] Middleton Murry picked up these volumes and ran them over, the first thing their eye would light upon would be a tiresome piece of “old-lady-poetry.” Why put a piece of feeble, foolish verse into a volume whose avowed excuse for being is its literary excellence?
I wish you would read “Decoration Day.” It’s simply one of the times when Miss Jewett didn’t accomplish what she longed to do. It scarcely belongs in the second grade of her work, much less the first.
However, if Miss Mary is set upon it, and you feel that you must concede to her, put it in; and I will, in that part of the preface where I say that the stories in Volume II are of unequal merit, simply say that I do not consider that one among her best, but include it at the request of friends. I’ll try to word it nicely. But do not take out “The Hiltons’ Holiday”! I don’t greatly love it, but one of the longest talks I ever had with Miss Jewett was about that story, and she felt strongly about it. I wonder what was the date of her letter to Mrs. Richards? To me she spoke differently. When I told her that “Decoration Day” to me seemed more like other people’s stories, she said with a sigh that it was one of the ones that had grown old-fashioned.
You see, in the preface I’ve made a very high claim for these stories, and I can defend it with any really first rate writer of any country; but no critic, no writer, could make such a claim for a conventional magazine story like “Decoration Day.” If you have to include it, I must say that it is done by request (which sounds foolish); otherwise that one story would quite invalidate the preface.
About this story you must do as you think best. I wish you could omit it. But about the Fairchild sonnet I can’t compromise–––what has an “occasional” sonnet to do with a literary work, even if it were a good sonnet? If you use the sonnet, I must withdraw the Preface altogether. I won’t be one bit disagreeable about it, you understand,—but I shall be firm.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
Won’t you take this up with Miss Mary? As an editor, with a publishing interest, you will have more influence than I.
Typically affable, Greenslet met Cather’s demands. Neither the sonnet nor “Decoration Day” appeared in the volume.
TO ZOË AKINS
September 7 [probably 1924]
Whale Cove Cottage, Grand Manan Island
Dear Zoë
I started to write you a birch bark letter, kid-fashion, but my pen is too stiff for it. We’ve had every kind of weather but heat; sun and and wind and splendid stunning fogs, and the tempest that beat the “Arabic” up so heavy carried our whole island out to sea. I’ve enjoyed every day of it and have been working hard and with great zest. Also walking lots, and cruising round among lighthouse and bell-buoys. Miss Lewis and I have a lovely little cottage all to ourselves—the house at which we eat not far away. I have literally lived in the tan-colored hunters suit you gave me two years ago, as it sheds the water from grass and trunk better than anything else I have. For really bad weather I wear knickerbockers. There are no roads—or very few—mostly trails through the woods and along the cliffs.
Love and greetings to you, dear Zoë, and I’ll have a few interesting things to show you when I get back about October 15.
Devotedly
W.S.C.
Willa Cather with her brother Roscoe’s daughters: Virginia and twins Margaret and Elizabeth, July 1924 (photo credit 7.3)
[Enclosed, written on birch bark:]
Dear Zoe:
Here I am in wild woods and wild weather. I’ve been working awfully hard on a quite new novel [The Professor’s House], and have got nearly half way through the first writing of it. It’s not very sweet or “appealing”—any diabetic patient could take it with safety! But it is, to me, fascinating in form—not intensely satisfying, but I can’t get away from it, and so I’ll have to see it through.
I’ve often thought with delight of the romantic costume with which you honored me that day you came to see me on Bank Street. It is really lovely for you.
TO FRANK ARTHUR SWINNERTON
September 18 [1924]
Grand Manan Island
Dear Mr. Swinnerton:
First let me set your mind at rest about the Proust book: I got the American edition of “Within a Budding Grove” [translation of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] some weeks before I received your letter. You were most kind to remember my impatience to get it, and far from having been neglectful, you’ve been over-punctilious in remembering your promise.
I am so glad you had a pleasant stay in Rome, and found the region of the Pincian gardens especially attractive. I always feel as if that were more all the many Romes of many ages heaped up together than any other part of the city. I’m sure it’s a Roman habit to pick up trifles: I once saw a lean priest appropriate a loaf of bread from a cart [and] tuck it into his gown.
You know something about American geography: June 10th I went out to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to receive a doctorate degree from the University. Then I went home to Red Cloud Nebraska (named for an Indian chief)
and stayed six weeks with my father and mother. Early in August raced back three days and three nights on trains and then a day by boat, out to this Island in the Bay of Fundy, off the coast of New Brunswick, where I had rented a cottage for the summer months. My little house is in an apple orchard that drops off into the sea about thirty yards from my study window. I have been working very hard, and happily, after six months of idleness. I hope you are happily at work by now. Working periods come and go like the tides in this treacherous Bay of Fundy—there’s no controlling them or prognosticating them. The Autumn fogs have come on now, and in three days I am leaving by our one and only twice-a-week-boat, for the mainland. I go for a week in Boston and then return to 5 Bank Street. You may be sure that when I go to England I shall call upon you and Mrs. Swinnerton, and shall hope to see a lot of you, in American idiom. With heartiest good wishes to you both,
Willa Cather
TO MR. MILLER
October 24, 1924
My dear Mr. Miller:
I am so sorry my writing vexes you, and it will continue to vex you! I do not in the least agree with your assumption that one kind of writing is right and another kind is wrong. I write at all because it pleases and amuses me—and I write in the way that pleases and amuses me. I had a perfectly good reason for writing “Antonia” in the first person, masculine—and I did not for one minute try to “talk like a man”. Such a thing as humbugging any one never occurred to me. It does not matter who tells a story. It is merely a point of view, a position which the writer takes in regard to his material; just as a painter must first decide what his position is to be in regard to whatever he is going to sketch.
Again, there is one kind of story that ought to tell itself—the story of action. There is another kind of story that ought to be told—I mean the emotional story, which tries to be much more like music than it tries to be like drama—the story that tries to evoke and leave merely a picture—a mood. That was what [Joseph] Conrad tried to do, and he did it well. I wholly disagree with you regarding Jean Christophe [multivolume novel by Romain Rolland] and Pelle the Conqueror [multivolume novel by Martin Andersen Nexø]. Do either of these books tell themselves? Not for a minute! I should say that Jean is one of the most subjective books written in the last twenty-five years. Where do you find any steady flow of action in that, my good man? Do you mean to say that Rolland is not Christophe, and that he is not explaining and diagraming his emotions every minute? What is that kind of “description” but explaining—explaining under a very thin disguise. I think I shall begin every story hereafter with; “We will begin our story on a winter evening in the late seventies” or something of that sort. That is a frank, honest way to begin. It is a story, and “we” are doing it, and we might as well admit it. I think the two greatest writers of fiction in modern times were Count Tolstoi and Ivan Turgenev, and I think they were equally magnificent in their achievement. Their methods were absolutely opposite, and I think both methods are entirely admirable.
