The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

  Monday [July 6, 1925?]

  Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mexico

  Dear Mrs. Luhon:

  The only ugly things we saw in Taos, the Meyers family, followed us straight to Santa Fé and the Fonda—faced us at dinner the first night! I was pleased to see Mr. [Andrew] Dasburg at breakfast this morning. I strove to get his attention for one half-hour, and then had to go up to him and hit him to get so much as a “Good-morning” out of him.

  I’m sending you some bum cigarettes because the tobacconist was just opening a fresh case and I thought they might be fresh. No Salisburys in tins here, but I’ll send you some from Denver. My lovely bracelet is with Mr. Yantz, and he took the turquoise out in my presence. I love it, and I think your giving it to me was a good omen for the book, for I find quite an astonishing collection of letters here awaiting me. Letters from old hard-boiled publishers and solemn professors, telling me that Tom Outland [the middle section of The Professor’s House], in Collier’s, gave them a pulse. It seems to have struck “other publishers” hard. I’m still hard on the trail of my old priests. I found a lot of interesting things this morning which I’ll tell you some day.

  On Wednesday we go to Laguna—though of course we’d like to start right back to Taos! Please give my warm regards to Miss [Mary] Foote and Tony. I’m afraid I’ll always be one of your “hangers-on” hereafter!

  Admiringly yours

  Willa Cather

  TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

  August 7 [1925]

  Hotel Olin, Denver

  Dear Mabel:

  How obliging of Clarence to make a natural climax to the article! We were held up three days at Lamy because of the washout at Trinidad—nothing running except over the Belen cut-off. At New Laguna we had to wait three days before the bold Indian boy, Sarissino, would even try to get us through eighteen miles of lake and mud to Acoma. There was a cloud-burst every afternoon: But we met very interesting people and didn’t mind the delay a bit.

  We joined my mother and sister here July 31st. We have a very comfortable apartment in this new and very good hotel. Mother is well enough to go to the theatre and take walks and motor rides. We will go home to Red Cloud about August 12th. Then I will hurry on to my island in the Bay of Fundy to get to work.

  August 8th

  Your letter sent to Bank Street, on to La Fonda, and finally here, has just arrived. The quotation from Plotinus is superb—who on earth is he?—and Background is exactly the right title for the first volume [of Luhan’s autobiography, Intimate Memories]. Don’t be discouraged if the latter part is harder to do, it’s bound to be harder. Very early memories are always the richest to work with. But that first part is glorious—it’s full of life and vigor and reality.

  My weeks with you in Taos stand out as the fine reality of the summer. I keep telling my little nieces about them. Yesterday my brother [Roscoe Cather] motored down from northern Wyoming and brought his three adorable little girls to us; the twins [Margaret and Elizabeth Cather], aged 10, and their sister [Virginia Cather] who is 13.

  With my warmest greetings

  Willa Cather

  Miss Lewis went on to New York last Monday.

  TO ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Tuesday [October 6, 1925]

  The Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

  Dear Mr. Knopf:

  Isn’t the “Professor” behaving splendidly? Neither you nor I foresaw anything like this last spring—though I had a certain hope in Tom Outland. “The Bishop”, too, is behaving well up in this part of the woods.

  Please ask one of your office people to go down to Ditson’s (or any other music store) and get a copy of the piano score of “Patience” and send it up to me. There’s a nice boy who will drum it for me in the evenings.

  And please send me a copy of the book with its new jacket, I’ve not seen one yet, and I did hate the text of the first jacket enormously.

  On the whole, it seems to me we can so far congratulate each other on the “Professor’s” account.

  Faithfully yours

  Willa Cather

  Cather had become acquainted with professors George and Harriet Whicher at the Bread Loaf School in 1922. Harriet Whicher taught at Mount Holyoke College, which is quite near Smith College.

  TO HARRIET FOX WHICHER

  October 16 [1925]

  Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

  Dear Mrs. Whicher:

  I have a little niece, aged 18, in the freshman class in Smith this year. Will you look her up at sometime when it’s convenient to you? Her name is Mary Virginia Auld—she pleases me, both as an Aunt and as Author. I believe you’ll think she’s rather charming. She’d love your boys—awfully handy with brothers.

  I’m hard at work here, after a glorious summer riding horseback in New Mexico—sage brush plains and aspen woods in high mountains. I wanted to go to Paris awfully in the spring, but somehow I wanted the sagebrush more. I have a regular Zane Gray mind; roughneck and low-brow is [the] name for me.

  I wished you could have been at the [Robert] Frost birthday dinner.

  Faithfully always

  Willa Cather

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

  October 22 [1925]

  Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

  My Dearest Dorothy:

  Since June first I’ve only been in New York 3 days, in September, on my way here. I was in New Mexico horse-back riding and doing camping trips until August 6th, then my mother and sister joined me in Denver and spent several weeks at a hotel there to escape Nebraska heat. Then home to Red Cloud for two weeks, then here, by way of New York.

  I’ve often spent the fall here, and love it. I’m having such a happy solitude,—after so many many people all summer. I walk in the morning and walk in the afternoon—and sleep at night, you can believe! I have to go back to Bank Street Oct. 30—but not for long, I am going to leave that hideous town for good very soon.

  Now why do you suppose “The Professor” is going better than any other book of mine? Knopf didn’t expect it, and I surely didn’t. I thought it a nasty, grim little tale, but the reviewers seem to think it’s a cross-word puzzle. It’s certainly not my “favorite” of my own books.

  Oh Dorothy, I love the story of your mother’s class-mate going to Italy. I wish I could see the Frosts again. But life does take me by the throat—no time for anything. I come up here to play with a nice little story, and a dozen things turn up to prevent me. But I’m not “prevented”, and I love this country so much.

  As to that “middle-aged” novel doesn’t everyone have it sometimes? I think one feels “age” more in seeing one’s friends grow older than in growing older oneself. And it’s [a] sad business. But the new story is “sunny” and so I’ve forgotten all that.

  Thank you for the French notice of “Antonia”, I liked it. I wish you could motor down here [from Vermont] for a day—is it very far, I wonder? I do want to live in the country all the year around!

  Lovingly, my dear

  Willa

  TO IRENE MINER WEISZ

  Monday [January 11, 1926]

  Dearest Irene;

  Professor St. Peter [character in The Professor’s House] has just gone and bought me a grand mink coat! Isn’t he extravagant? I want you please to telegraph Mr. Weisz’s office here to send a man up to the house to insure it for me, on Friday or Saturday of this week at noon (12 oclock) if possible. I’m afraid I’ll lose it just because it’s the first “valuable” I’ve ever had.

  I’m working like a beaver, Dear, and I love my Bishop!

  Yours always

  Willa

  Cather’s eighth novel, a short one, was My Mortal Enemy, published by Knopf in the fall of 1926.

  TO ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Thursday [probably January 14, 1926]

  Dear Mr. Knopf:

  Your letter about “My Mortal Enemy” gives me great encouragement. It is an exceptional story; not many people will se
e that, possibly. But it means a great deal to me that you do. I want to be a “good investment” for you financially, but I want very much more to be able to interest you as a reader. I hope to be able to interest you for many years to come. I value your respect and would like to keep it. I think when you see the Archbishop you’ll find a new kind of flavor.

  I look forward to seeing you and Blanche on Tuesday evening.

  Faithfully

  Willa Cather

  In early 1926 Ferris Greenslet asked if she would be willing to make some change to the Introduction to My Ántonia so Houghton Mifflin could sell it as a new edition—and raise the price a little.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  February 15, 1926

  My dear Mr. Greenslet:

  Mr. Knopf told me of your decision with regard to the question of transferring my books to him. If the company is not willing to sell the books to him, then I think it ought to be willing to make some effort to sell them as if they were live property—not merely “creditable” books on the list, by Charles Egbert Craddock or Celia Thaxter, or somebody long deceased.

  Now, I come to the question of “Antonia.” Of course, I do not think that in pushing “Antonia” or “O Pioneers,” it is quite fair for you to disparage a book I published last year or the book I will publish next year. As I told you, I do not like the attitude that “A Lost Lady” was in any sense a repetition of “Antonia,” though Mrs. Forrester was one of the women who employed the “hired girls” to whom Antonia belonged. (Confidentially, let me tell you that the real Antonia [Anna Pavelka] actually did work for the real Mrs. Forrester [Lyra Garber].) The stories are studies of the same society, but they are studies of two very different elements in it, and they are written in a very, very different way.

  Now, as to the preface. The preface is not very good; I had a kind of complex about it. I wrote and rewrote it, and it was the only thing about the story that was laborious. But I still think that a preface is necessary, even if it is not good in itself. Let me take a trial at shortening the preface. The later part of the book, I am sure, would be vague if the reader did not know something about the rather unsuccessful personal life of the narrator.

  I am terribly busy just now and shrink from breaking in at all on the story I have in hand. When do you want to bring out this new edition and when would you need the copy of the revised preface?

  Regarding the Benda illustrations: you would, of course, retain those. It is one of the few cases where I think the pictures really help the story, and I would not be willing to leave them out.

  Cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  Carroll Atwood Wilson, another in the line of people interested in Cather’s work on the Mary Baker Eddy book, was an attorney and book collector.

  TO CARROLL ATWOOD WILSON

  March 18, 1926

  My dear Mr. Wilson:

  Since my return your letter of inquiry has been brought to my attention. I do not wish to be ungracious, but the subject is really one upon which I do not care to make a statement. The idea that Georgine Milmine is a myth amuses me very much. She is a very lively and husky person who lives in the western part of this State, and who collected the great mass of material from which the McClure history was written. She did not write much of it herself. That was done mostly in the office by McClures editorial staff. I took my turn at it, as did several other persons. It was not a subject I would have chosen to work upon, or a subject in which I had any particular interest. My interest was a purely editorial one; to arrange the mass of notes and documents in a form that would be clear and effective for serial publication. You can readily understand why I do not wish to have my name connected in any way with a piece of work which was not of my own choosing, and in which I had only a partial responsibility—a responsibility shared with four or five other persons.

  If I remember rightly, Mr. Smith’s connection with the magazine did not begin until some time after the publication of this series of articles. His information, therefore, must have been second-hand.

  I beg you, dear Mr. Wilson, to consider this confidential. I have been asked this question many times and have always before refused to make any reply whatsoever, but your profession seems to me a guarantee of discretion, and I feel sure you will keep this statement for your personal information and let it go no further. A shaping hand over the form, arrangement, and presentation of the facts in that series of articles, I did have.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Willa Cather

  The following letter survives only in a transcription made by literary agent Paul Revere Reynolds or, more likely, a member of his staff. According to a note on the transcription, Reynolds sent the original to the Forum in July 1926 when he was trying to sell the serial rights to Death Comes for the Archbishop. The Forum bought the rights.

  TO PAUL REVERE REYNOLDS

  [Probably April 25, 1926]

  Dear Mr. Reynolds:

  This story is not a love story, any more than “Robinson Crusoe” is; it is simply not that sort of story at all. It is concerned with the picturesque conditions of life in the Southwest, just at the time that New Mexico was taken over from Old Mexico, and with the experiences of two Catholic missionaries who were sent there to bring order out of the mixture of Indian and Spanish and Mexican superstitions. The real hero of the story is Father Latour (his real name was Lamy) the young Frenchman who was made Bishop of New Mexico at the age of 37, a man of an old and noble family in Puy de Dom, a man of wide culture, an idealist, and from his youth hungry for the world’s frontiers. He was finally made an archbishop, and died in Santa Fe in 1886. In other words, he went there in the days of the buffalo and Indian massacres, and he lived to see the Santa Fe railroad cross New Mexico.

  As I told you, I had the good fortune to come upon a great many letters written by the Bishop and his Vicar to their families in France, so that I have not had to depend upon my own invention for the reactions of these two French priests to the conditions they met there. Many of the incidents are invention, some of them are used almost literally as they happened, such as the chapter called “The White Mules.”

  There will be five more chapters in Part I,—they are written but not typed. Part II will be much shorter than Part I, but in a much deeper tone and with a deeper, graver color.

  Willa Cather

  Cather did revise the introduction to My Ántonia, and a new edition was released by Houghton Mifflin in 1926.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  [Early May 1926]

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  Here is the revised introduction. For Heaven’s sake don’t lose it! I’d never be able to patch it up again. Please send me proofs before the 15th of May if possible, if not you’ll have to send them out to New Mexico, where I will be rather hard to reach.

  Hastily

  W.S.C.

  Please mail me a copy of Antonia on the day you receive this,—I’ve had to cut into my only copy to make the Introduction.

  Cather and Lewis returned to New Mexico and Arizona in 1926 to continue research for Death Comes for the Archbishop. While there, they were joined by Cather’s brother Roscoe and his family: wife Meta and daughters Margaret, Elizabeth, and Virginia.

  TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

  May 26 [1926]

  El Navajo, Gallup, New Mexico

  Dear Mabel:

  I don’t know whether you are East or West—but I have a feeling you are west, or on the way.

  We left N.Y. on the 15th, stopped a few days with my mother and father in Nebraska, and after a day’s pause at Lamy came out here. Isn’t Gallup the Hell of a place? I never saw so many low types in one town. We were both awfully tired and have not been doing much. Edith got a nasty cold coming out of Nebraska in a prairie heat wave, and we’ve been curing that. Tomorrow we go to Zuni, and we hope to make Canyon de Chelly later. We can’t do it unless Edith gets over her cough, for the drivers tell me it’s a harder trip than it’s advertised to be. We have ve
ry comfortable rooms here, and Edith has been very happy and relaxed in bed for two days, while I’ve made several strange and terrible acquaintances.

  My brother and his peerless twins (also his wife and another daughter aged 13) meet me at Santa Fé June 14. They will have only a week, so I expect to lead a busy life until they’re gone.

  July 1st I get to work again, but I’ve not made up my mind as to just where. Miss Lewis starts for N.Y. June 28th. She will take another vacation of a month in August and will probably join me in New Hampshire or New Brunswick.

  If you’re still in New York I may see you as you go through Santa Fe. Oh Mabel, we rode from Lamy to Gallup on the same train with Rin-Tin-Tin, and had the pleasure of meeting him during the half-hour at Albuquerque. I never was so excited about any celebrity before!

  Yours

  W.S.C.

  Address LaFonda, Santa Fe after June 1st.

  TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

  Saturday [probably June 5, 1926]

  Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mexico

  Dear Mabel:

  Here we are, after a thrilling trip to Canyon de Chelly. I am wondering if you could rent us the pink house (the one we were in last summer) for two weeks. Edith has to start for New York on the 23rd of June, but if I found I could work in the pink house I would stay on through July, coming back to Santa Fe for the last week of June to join my brother. He would be here for five or six days only.