by Willa Cather
Of course I don’t know whether you are settled yet, or whether you are in the mood for wanting people about. I wish I could talk to you by telephone but this line is out of order and they won’t give me a connection.
Since I can’t talk to you I see no way but to thus abruptly enquire whether you would take us for boarders—whether you could make us a flat rate of twenty-five or thirty dollars each per week, as our friends at Grand Manan do. If this wouldn’t suit you, simply drop me a line to that effect. I know that renting your guest houses is one thing, and feeding people quite another and much more inconvenient. On the other hand there would hardly be time for us to rig up a kitchen in the pink house if I’m going to be working.
All this is a suggestion which needn’t bother you if it’s impractical—merely dismiss it with a word.
We are most comfortable here, but the Indian Detourists [participants in tours offered by the Fred Harvey Company] abound and the motor horn is the worm that dieth not. The de Vargas might be quieter, but they are building, as you doubtless know. We got in only yesterday and have seen nobody as yet. I won’t make any further plans until I hear from you. Somehow, I’m awful glad to be back in this country.
Devotedly
W.S.C
TO ROSCOE CATHER
Saturday [June 26, 1926]
Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mexico
My Dear Roscoe:
Last night I went to sleep thinking cheerfully of the twins and surely should have had pleasant dreams. But not so at all—I dreamed that Margaret was eaten by a lion! We all saw her sitting in a lion’s cage in a circus parade, and felt very proud of her, and after the cage passed word travelled back through the crowd that the lion had eaten her! And her grandmother & grandfather Cather both fainted and had to be carried out of the crowd, and then I wakened up.
Tell them I went right up to Mrs. Austin’s house to work that morning as soon as you left, and found my Bishop there waiting for me. I have worked every day since then. Tony [Luhan] is still in the hospital with a high temperature, and his wife is terrified. I talked to her by long distance yesterday. I shall go back to my little house in Taos about July 4 or 5, as Mabel has a housekeeper there in her absence and a friend I like from New York is coming there at that date. I am so glad you did go home by way of Taos. Maybe I’ll have a little house there some day, where the children can visit me. I hope you and Meta and Elsie enjoyed your stay here one half as much as I did, and I do wish I could see you all and the children soon again. I love your little girls very dearly, all three of them.
With much love
Willie
No sign of Douglass!
Ask the twins and Virginia to write me, and tell me what they liked best down here.
TO MARY AUSTIN
June 26 [1926]
Hotel La Fonda, Sante Fe, New Mexico
Dear Mrs. Austin;
A week ago today I first went up to your lovely house to see whether I could settle down to work there—and I have not missed a morning since then! It is the most restful, quiet, sympathetic place to work in. I do not use your little study, but sit in your dear little blue plush chair in that corner of the library—I hope I won’t wear that chair out—open the screened portion of your big window, and there I sit and write on my knee. I like being in that fine big room, with so much space about me, and the breeze comes in comfortingly at that window.
The girl who waters your flowers is as punctual as a clock, and so far the house has not got at all dusty. What a satisfying, real sort of house it is,—and what a generous friend you were to give me permission to work there. If you hadn’t had that kind thought for me, I would be up in the air now. I meant to go back to Taos soon after my brother and his family left Santa Fe, but long before that Tony, who had been ailing all the time we were there, got suddenly worse, and Mabel eloped with him to this hospital at Albuquerque. They will be there for ten days or two weeks longer, for Tony still has a temperature. For some days it was 104, and Mabel was terribly frightened. She said she’d never seen him sick before, and she didn’t take it cooly at all. She has a new housekeeper in Taos, and begged me to go and stay, but I thought that would be dismal. Mary Foote arrives in Taos July 3d, and I will go down (or is it up?) soon afterward. Miss Foote is good company and I’m very fond of her.
When Mabel fled from Taos and the pink house there suddenly assumed a deserted and forbidding look, [here] appears Mrs. Huey with the key to your house, like a coincidence on the stage!
I hope your surgeon will hurry the time of your operation along. I’ve had several, and I always hate waiting for them much more than having them.
My love and good wishes to you, dear Mrs. Austin, and my gratitude for the happy peaceful hours I have spent in your library.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
In 1932, Mary Austin wrote negatively of Death Comes for the Archbishop and its focus on French missionaries in her autobiography Earth Horizon, and she reportedly showed friends the chair in her house that Cather sat in while writing the novel. Annoyed at Austin’s remarks and violation of her privacy, Cather later denied that any part of the book was written in Austin’s house. However, the copy given to Austin at the time of publication bore this inscription: “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book. She will be my sternest critic and she has the right to be.”
TO LOUISE GUERBER BURROUGHS
Sunday [August 22, 1926]
The MacDowell Colony, Peterboro, New Hampshire
My Dear Louise;
Funny place for me to be? Perhaps. I found myself in New York in the first dreadful week of August, my chore at the printers’ done (250 signatures [of My Mortal Enemy] on 100 percent linen-rag paper brought from Italy) and no place to work. So I telegraphed Mrs. [Marian] MacDowell and asked her if she could take me in and give me a studio. I have a beautiful studio in a fine wood, looking out on Monadnock. At first I didn’t like the “colonists”, but now I like them nearly all—some of them very much. As people they’re mostly nice, if only they wouldn’t talk about their damned professions and call them “arts”! Some of them are very nice. I’m enjoying the Bishop again, after weeks of separation—its like a ball where you have to dance for hours with other partners and then come back to the real one. When I was in N.Y. I sold the serial rights to the “Forum”, to begin in December. That will crowd me just a little. September 8 I go to Jaffrey, Miss Lewis will join me for the month. I’ll be there until late in October.
My dear, I found a letter from you in Red Cloud which my naughty parents had not forwarded—but no offense meant, there were dozens of letters there. My parents are Southern and don’t get agitated. Don’t miss “Iolanthe”, if it’s still going. If you hear of anything good to read, tell me. Don’t get impatient, but I hope we can do some things together when I do go back to town.
Yours
W.S.C.
Alfred Knopf wrote Cather in the summer of 1926 to ask if she would appear at a book fair to oblige the Joseph Horne Company, one of Knopf’s large accounts.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
September 8 [1926]
Peterboro, New Hampshire
Dear Mr. Knopf;
I’d like to oblige the Joseph Horne people, but if I once began that kind of thing, there’d be no end to it. One has to do that sort of thing thoroughly, as Edna Ferber does it, or not do it at all. In these days, NOT doing it is a kind of publicity in itself,—though that’s not the reason I refrain.
Please tell them that I will be in Canada then, finishing my new novel, and that as the serialization of that novel begins in December, I can’t interrupt my work so near to publication date; The Forum has to have the copy for the first two installments November 1st.
That is all true, except, possibly Canada, and [that] is certainly a plausible escape. Please tell them I’d love to make an exception in their case, as I have old friends in Pittsburgh.
Please ask your secret
ary to have one copy of “A Lost Lady” mailed to me at Jaffrey, whither I go in a few days, and to send me two copies of the new book as soon as it’s out. But ask your mailing department to hold the ten complimentary copies that come to me in the office until my return.
My warmest welcome to Blanche and Alfred.
Yours
Willa Cather
TO MISS CHAPIN, THE FORUM
September 24 [1926]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Dear Miss Chapin;
I think it’s rather a mistake to emphasize the landscape—to me that suggests ornamental descriptive writing, which I hate. There really is a good deal of movement in this narrative. In future announcements won’t you, with Dr. [Henry Goddard] Leach’s approval, use something like the enclosed, putting the stress more on the people than the scene?
Sincerely
Willa Cather
Miss Cather’s new narrative, Death Comes etc, recounts the adventures of two missionary priests in the old Southwest. Two hardy French priests find themselves set down in the strange world at the end of the Santa Fé trail, among scouts and trappers and cut-throats, old Mexican settlements and ancient Indian pueblos. The period is that immediately following the Mexican War, and the story is a rich, moving panorama of life on that wild frontier.
On October 2, 1926, Blanche Colton Williams, chair of the O. Henry Memorial Committee, wrote Cather offering to publish My Mortal Enemy in the volume O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories. Cather and Knopf had no intention of presenting in an anthology of short stories a work they were soon to publish as a book of its own.
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
Wednesday [October 6, 1926]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Dear Blanche;
Why do these nuts keep trying to separate us from our Mortal Enemy? Please write this lady telling her it can’t be done. I have sent her a line to that effect also.
The copies of the books have arrived—I think Mr. Adler has done himself and me proud. It’s a lovely book. I only hope the public will be as eager to get away with it as these short story cranks seem to be.
You’ll have the rest of the Archbishop about October twenty-ninth, when I’ll return to Bank street.
Please, kind friend, have somebody send me Virginia Wolfe’s “The Voyage Out”—I’m in an awful plight for something to read and don’t know what to order, but I want to try that.
Hastily
W.S.C.
TO LOUISE GUERBER BURROUGHS
October 15 [1926]
The Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Dear Louise;
I won’t be back in town before November 4th or 5th, probably. I’m flirting a little with a story that’s been knocking round in my head for sometime. Title “Blue Eyes on the Platte”—PLATTE, not plate. Rather frivolous and decidedly sentimental, love’s-young-dream sort of thing. The natural result of a year of celibacy with the Archbishop. Yes, he’s done and gone—at his head a copyreader’s smirch, at his feet a stone.
Now how did I prejudice you against Rebecca West? Am I that sort of [person] who manages to give someone a black eye while pretending to praise them?
Oh tell me this name, the Chinese or Japanese name of that wonderful candy Bauer makes, which is butterscotch, chocolate and almond flakes, all in little squares. Almond what? I want to order some. It’s lovely here now—everyone gone, weather wild and tragic with brilliant intervals. I have the hotel and the mountain to myself.
Yours
W.S.C.
“Blue Eyes on the Platte” probably refers to the novel that became Lucy Gayheart, though it was not published until 1935.
In a review of My Mortal Enemy in the New York Times Book Review on October 24, 1926, titled “Willa Cather Fumbles for Another Lost Lady,” Louis Kronenberger questioned whether the book really ought to be called a “novel.”
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
Sunday [October 24, 1926]
My Dear Blanche;
I haven’t seen the Times notice, and I shall avoid seeing it—just as well, as it’s by someone whose opinion one needn’t regard. Don’t you think it is perhaps a mistake to advertise that book as a “novel,” Blanche? It’s not really that. Couldn’t the ad writer call it a “Story,” merely? That would arouse less antagonism.
I’ll be leaving Jaffrey in a few days now, as I’ll stop to make some short visits on the way home. So after this send all mail to 5 Bank Street.
Please thank Alfred for the Chorleys [Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, by Henry F. Chorley]. They are beautifully printed, and I hope they will do well. Very soon I’ll be seeing you both, until then, Good Luck.
Yours
W.S.C.
After the publication of My Mortal Enemy in late October of 1926, reviewers speculated on the meaning of its title. Fanny Butcher, in her glowing notice in the Chicago Tribune, stated that the book deals with “the fundamental hatred of the sexes one for the other and their irresistible attraction one for the other.” Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry Magazine, brought the notice to Cather’s attention.
TO HARRIET MONROE
October 27 [1926]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Dear Miss Monroe;
Thank you so much for Miss Butcher’s review. It’s so agreeable to have someone see what the story was about! Not one of the other reviews I’ve seen but said “Ah yes, we are all our own worst Enemy!” Sad and true—but in this instance not the point!
My eyes are all right again, thanks.
Cordially yours
Willa Cather
TO FANNY BUTCHER
October 27 [1926]
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Dear Fanny Butcher;
It’s worth writing a book to have somebody get the point of it absolutely. I’m willing to bet you’re the only one who does—no other review that I’ve seen comes anywhere near getting it. Of course the thing I was writing about was just that fundamental attraction and antagonism—that the more complete and intense the pleasure of being two is, the more fiercely the individual self in one resents it, sooner or later. Not a question of pale loves at all, this; but of the fierce and brilliant ones—which are rare.
Harriet Munro[e] was kind enough to send me your review. Will you please send me two more copies? I want to send them to dear friends in France.
I’ve had a glorious autumn up here, and have done some mountain climbing I’m very shirty about—for I have short legs, and a good many pounds to carry up to the summit! I go back to N.Y. tomorrow. Please let me know if you come to town. I do hope you’ll like my Archbishop, Fanny. Begins in the Forum in January, but I’m omitting about one-fourth for the serial. 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!
Thank you, dear Fanny, for taking the trouble to get the point of a story so devilish hard to tell as my “Mortal Enemy.”
Yours
Willa Cather
TO MARY VIRGINIA AULD
Saturday [February 19, 1927]
Dearest M.V.
How nice of you to send me an edible valentine! I’d been rather low in mind for a few days, and a bunch of Valentines, mostly flowers, quite cheered me up. Nothing in particular to make me feel blue, except that I don’t see my way to beginning a new story as exciting as the Archbishop right now, and reading proofs is dull work after writing,—it’s like trying to have a gorgeous party over again–––can’t be done. You can have a new adventure, but you can never have the same one over.
[Albert] Donovan was here for dinner last night and we went to see my crush, Rin-tin-tin. [Edward] Steichen, the photographer of the Rich and Great, is coming to dinner tonight. I have a new dinner dress, and a rather gorgeous new afternoon dress,—that’s about all the news. When the proofs get further along, I want you to come down some week-end; y
ou see Edith reads them with me, and we can only work at them on week-ends. By the way, how did you come out in the examinations?
With heaps of love
W.S.C.
TO META SCHAPER CATHER
March 19 [probably 1927]
My Dearest Meta:
If you want to get Virginia in at Smith in a few years, you must write an application to the Registrar at once and send the ten dollar registration fee. Mary Virginia spent last weekend with us and we were talking it over. She said a letter of introduction from me would help,—everything there is booked up for years to come.
I have time for a word only. Edith has been in the hospital two weeks, following a rush operation for a very nasty appendix. She was brought home today and will be in bed for two weeks more at least. Then I must try to get her away somewhere. The city is building a new subway down our poor little street and under our very house, so it’s like living in a bombarded city–––bad place for a recovery! We have the same nice colored maid we had when Roscoe was here, and she has been a tower of strength and kindness in these troublesome times.
I am so glad you all like my Archbishop. I had a lovely time working on him, and I think pretty well of him myself. But this has been a dreary, wasted winter; all broken up by trivial things.
My dearest love to you all
Willa Cather
The following letter was published in the Nebraska State Journal on July 24, 1927.
TO WILL OWEN JONES
March 22 [1927]
My Dear Mr. Jones;
Certainly I wish to send my congratulations to the Journal on it’s sixtieth birthday. I have many pleasant memories connected with it,—with the Journal, I mean, not with its birthday. You see I still write as badly as ever.
The first time I was ever confronted by myself in print was one Sunday morning (please don’t append an editorial note here, stating just how many years ago it was) when I opened the Sunday Journal and saw, stretching out through a column or two, an essay on “Some Personal Characteristics of Thomas Carlyle” which Professor [Ebenezer] Hunt had given you to publish, quite without my knowledge. That was the beginning of many troubles for me. Up to that time I had planned to specialize in science; I thought I would like to study medicine. But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! It has a kind of hypnotic effect. I still vaguely remember that essay, and it was a splendid example of the kind of writing I most dislike; very florid and full of high-flown figures of speech,—and, if I recall aright, not a single ‘Personal Characteristic’ of the gentleman was mentioned! I wrote that title at the top of the page, because it was the assigned subject, and then poured out, as best I could, the feelings that a fervid reading of “The French Revolution” and “Sartor Resartus” had stirred up in me. Come to think of it, that flowery effusion had one merit,—it was honest. Florid as it was, it didn’t over color the pleasure and delightful bitterness that Carlyle can arouse in a very young person. It makes one feel so grown up to be bitter!
