by Willa Cather
Now I want you to relieve my mind a little. The enclosed letter tells its own sad story.
1st Won’t the Bladen bank come back and pay at least part of what it owes its depositors?
2nd What about the Inavale bank?
Why in thunder don’t these people bank with Walter [Sherwood]—where they have a chance? What’s the matter with the Lambrechts?
Now will you be my Santa Claus? I want them to have a good Christmas dinner. I know they won’t buy prunes or dried apricots, they felt too poor to get them last year.
Please have Mrs. Burden pack a box:
2 dozen of the best oranges,
3 pounds of dates,
5 pounds best prunes
3 cans Texas figs
3 pounds cranberries
3 bunches celery
1 peck red apples
If there is any money left over after you get these things, get some Butternut coffee—I know they will cut the old lady down on her coffee, so put whatever is left into coffee.
I’ve already sent Mrs. Lambrecht a Christmas box, a lovely sweater and a lot of toys, but that was before I got Lydia’s letter.
I’m sitting in the middle of a pile of trunks, dear Carrie. We move today. I think the new apartment will be lovely, but I’d have waited another year if I’d known so many of my old friends were going to be hard hit. I do want to help.
Lovingly
Willie
New address:
570 Park Avenue
(not far from [Mary] Virginia, I’m glad to say!
Roscoe’s Virginia is to spend the Christmas holidays with me.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
[Around December 29, 1932]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
Excuse old machine,—only one at hand.
This morning I received from a Miss Hahn, with no sort of letter or apology, a barbarously reconstructed version of “Antonia.” You spoke to me of using a portion of the book, some twenty pages; you did not mention such a horror as a skeletonized version of the whole novel. The lady has tried to make it a story of action; now it was never meant to be a story of action.
I had decided, after your talk with me, to allow your educational department to use the first thirty pages of the book, minus the introduction. If it would be an accommodation to you, personally, I would still be willing to allow that, on condition that there shall be no cuts at all in the text, and that this lady shall not write the introduction.
Can’t we just drop the whole matter, anyway? You tell me they want something of ‘mine’. Then your educators go and make this text as much like Zane Grey as possible. The reconstruction by Miss Hahn has neither Zane Grey’s merits nor mine.
Really, my dear F.G., you’ve never treated “Antonia” very gallantly. You are always trying to do her in and make her cheap. (That’s exaggeration, of course, but I’m really very much annoyed.) And you know how you’ve suggested cheap editions, film possibilities, etc. Antonia has done well enough by her publishers as she is, not in the cut rate drugstores or re-written by Miss Hahn. She made her way by being what she is, not by being the compromise her publishers have several times tried to make her. Even a cut in price would be a compromise in the case of that particular book, I think. And as to a cut in text, reducing the whole book to some few thousand words—! Those horrible boil-downs of “Notre Dame de Paris” and “Adam Bede” which are handed out to children are poison, as you well know.
I’m in my new house, but not unpacked, hence this untidy machine letter.
You see I don’t want to go into a book that is made up of reconstructions of this kind, where the text is boiled down. It doesn’t give youngsters even a chance to come in contact with the writing personality of a single one of the writers presented to them in this packing-house form. I think it’s the lowest trick ever put over on young people.
Enraged though I am, I’m still your very good friend, and I send you good New Year wishes from my heart. Only let me hear no more of Miss Hahn and her stupid, brutal trade.
Faithfully (and affectionately) yours
Willa Cather
My new apartment will be ever so nice when it’s done.
TO ZOË AKINS
New Year’s Eve [December 31, 1932]
570 Park Avenue, New York City
My Darling Zoë;
On Christmas Eve, when the two little nieces were sitting before the fire and the new apartment was trimmed with greens, Josephine [Bourda] (the same old Josephine) came in bearing a tall tree all blossoming with spring, and announced “Un pommier, mademoiselle. Il faut faire les apple-pies!” [“It’s an apple tree, miss. We can bake apple pies!”] Thorley must have sent the best he had for you, and the sudden advent of such a spring-time thing had something quite magical about it. There was just the right place for it, against my new french damask curtains, of which I am awfully proud. It is just as graciously blooming on New Year’s eve as it was on Xmas eve, and I know you’d be glad for all the pleasure I’ve had from it.
Yes, the same Josephine! You must remember her, the big frenchwoman who was such a good cook. Last winter I heard by chance that her husband was very ill and her two daughters out of work, so I sent her a check to cover hospital expenses. When I took this apartment I sent for her to help me arrange things. She has not been in service since she left me, but she says she’d like to stay on, and God grant she may continue to feel thus. Such food, my dear, as she gives me! It’s very amusing—I find I learned most everything in “Shadows on the Rock” from five years of Josephine! And I, conceited donkey, found that knowledge of pots and pans there in my head when I needed it (french pots and pans, which are very different) and I never gave a thought as to why I found myself able to write about french household economics with ease and conviction.
Well, tomorrow begins a new year. I wish you might have had it with your Hugo, dear Zoe. But really, our measurements of time are foolish—correct for business officers only—In our real, personal lives a week is often longer than ten years. I remember one summer that was longer than the twenty-five years that have followed it. Personal life can’t be measured by the calendar. So I wish you a New Year full of growth and the best things that help one over hard places.
Lovingly
Willa
The February 1933 issue of Atlantic Monthly published Cather’s essay “A Chance Meeting,” which told the story of Cather’s serendipitous 1930 meeting with Madame Grout, the niece of Gustave Flaubert, in Aix-les-Bains, France.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
January 11 [1933]
570 Park Avenue, New York City
[Written in the top margin:] Telephone Regent 4–8354
My dear Dorothy;
It has been so long since I have written a letter because I wanted to that I scarcely know how to go about it. I’ve never even thanked you for your telegram last Christmas, or told you that the two winter months at home in the old house, among the old neighbors were more perfect than things often are—they meant more than years and years of life in other places. This winter I’ve at last found and taken a quiet apartment, got my things out of storage, and I think I’m going to love it when the long grind of “settling” is over. Edith Lewis is with me, and I have the same frenchwoman from the Basque country whom I had all through the war. When you are next in town won’t you please make a date with me and come to see me—for tea if you can.
I want you to look in the February Atlantic for an account of a delightful adventure which will mean more to you than to most people who read it. I couldn’t tell all the story without saying too much about myself—but you already know what I did not include. Wasn’t it funny that it happened to me? I so well remember when I began to read Flaubert in Red Cloud, and when I dug through Salammbô and all the Letters with George Seibel, the German proofreader in Pittsburgh. Do read the Letters to Caroline over again! What a wonderful woman. For those few thrilling days at Aix-les Bains I had the whole group of her time in my two hands
—they were more real than anything on earth to me. No work of art can recall and reproduce a period as a living human person can—if it’s the right person.
I’m as well as anybody could be who went through moving in the Christmas shopping storm, with a Wyoming niece [Virginia Cather] on my hands for her college vacation. I parked her at a dear little hotel, and greatly enjoyed the time I could spend with her. I got off all my Christmas boxes to my old women on the farms out west. For three of them, thank God, I have been able to save their farms by paying their interest. About nothing ever gave me such pleasure as being able to help them keep their land—the land they’ve worked on since I was ten years old!
Now I’ve got to go to a business meeting, but I’ve had half an hour with you, anyway. I’m so glad you liked Mrs. Harris. I fussed with it a little, but I got very nearly the tone I was trying for.
With love always, even if I write so seldom.
Willa
On February 2, 1933, Cather was ceremoniously awarded the first Prix Femina Americain for Shadows on the Rock. The book was selected by French and American committees, and the presentation of the prize was made by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ
Thursday [January 1933?]
Dearest Irene;
The news won’t be out until next week, but Alfred has just telephoned me that the Prix Femina (PRIX FEMINA) has been awarded to me for “Shadows”, and that the French Ambassador will give a luncheon for me in New York, and that I’ll have to go—or take a train for California! What a life!—when I want so much to give my time to the apartment. This will mean interviews, letters, telegrams etc, etc. Just at this time it’s a real calamity. Meanwhile, it’s a secret between you and me and Mr. Wise [Weisz] until you see it in the papers.
Lovingly
W.
On May 28, 1933, Dorothy Canfield Fisher published a profile of Cather in the New York Herald Tribune called “Daughter of the Frontier.” The next letter anticipates the article.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
[Probably early 1933]
My Dearest Dorothy;
Of course I’d rather have you do such an article than anyone else, and they’ve been after me through several people who knew nothing at all about me. I’m fairly sick of this legend of a pale creature who has sacrificed her life to art. I never in my life made a sacrifice to ‘art’. Even as to teaching, I simply taught because I found it less distasteful than newspaper work. All my life I’ve shoved away the less agreeable for the more agreeable. The things that really attracted me were so much more attractive that I never found it at all hard to push aside the minor attractions, even when they were very pleasant. I’ve lead a life of self-indulgence, if ever anybody did. I wanted to see the world a bit and meet all sorts of people, so I spent five years on McClure’s doing it. When I’d had enough, I stopped. I expect I’ve spent as much time hearing music as most people spend on their profession–––pure self indulgence. This is the truth, you know. So please don’t make me either noble or pathetic. Of course, in youth, when one is poor, one struggles; but what else is youth for? If one were rich and buried under tutors and ‘advantages’, there would be another kind of struggle. And I never shut myself away from the people I cared for, you know that. I shut out the crowd to be ‘all there’ with my friends.
Hastily but lovingly
Willa
Cather’s repeated claims that she was born in 1876, as in the letter below, misrepresent her actual birth date of December 7, 1873.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
[February 16, 1933]
My Dear Dorothy;
You’ve certainly done this operation as gently as it could be done, and you’ve been noble about keeping away from trivial personal stories,—of which you could tell so many! I’ve corrected two dates; I was born December 7, 1876.
Any summing up of one’s books sounds strange to one, because one was never conscious of doing things consistently,—each book seemed a totally new thing, an escape, indeed, from the others. But if there is a common denominator, it is Escape, and you’ve hit on it. When I get on a Santa Fe train now and swing west to the coast, I often waken in my berth with that glorious feeling I had in childhood, the certainty of countless miles of empty country and open sky and wind and night on every side of me. It’s the happiest feeling I ever have. And when I am most enjoying the lovely thing[s] the world is full of, it’s then I am often most homesick for just that emptiness and that untainted air.
I’m rushing this back to you with my deepest th[a]nks for your protecting arm.
Lovingly
Willa
Smith College wished to bestow an honorary degree on Cather in June 1933, when her niece Virginia Cather was to graduate.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
April 3 [1933]
New York City
My Dear Boy;
Your letter came just in time. When I found I could not get a room at the Northampton Inn, I was seriously thinking of going down to Bermuda and side-stepping the Smith Commencement. (I won’t stay with Professors and help them pay off their social debts, you know.) But since you think Virginia would be disappointed, I will manage to be there. I have written the hotel at Amherst to engage a room, but have had no reply. Of course everything is crowded at that season. I’m going not at all for the degree, which I certainly don’t need, but on your account, and on Mother’s. When I thought it over, I was sure that she would want me to be there. I have not even written Virginia since Christmas. I have not done a stroke of serious work this winter. My correspondence and business affairs have driven me to the limit all the time. I had lost a good deal of money on bonds going bad, so I’ve simply devoted my time to getting rid of the old municipals which used to be so good, and putting the money into Tel. and Tel, and into Government bonds. Of course I’ve had to sell at 60 to 75, but it was the only thing to do. I’ve had Alfred Knopf’s lawyer to help me. But such transactions, together with the awful Income tax I have to pay, have broken up my winter completely.
I’ll do the best I can to represent you at Commencement and keep Virginia from feeling lonely.
With a heartful of love,
Willie
TO ROSCOE CATHER
April 25, 1933
My dear Roscoe:
I ought to have sent you a telegram. I was so glad to hear that your bank stood firm through the storms—what storms they have been! I wonder what you think of all that is going on in the world now, especially in the banking world. As for me, I simply think anything is better than timidity and inactivity. I do not think Roosevelt is any giant of intellect and he may run us into a few snags, but at least we will be moving,—and for the first time since Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House we have a President who can speak French to the French Ambassador! The whole misunderstanding with [Pierre] Laval came about from the fact that when Hoover thought he was paying a compliment, Laval thought he was making a promise. I am simply driven to death with the yearly college torment and haven’t much time to write, but I wish you would keep me posted on how affairs are going with you and the bank in Wyoming.
With special love to Twinnies,
Willie
TO S. S. MCCLURE
May 26 [1933?]
New York City
Dear Mr. McClure;
I have been hoping that I would see you again before the summer scattering, but now that the hot weather has come suddenly I am leaving town to stay with friends in the country. Later I go to Canada. When I come back in the fall we must have another evening together and talk over our old friends, and about those days when we worked so happily together. I was always eager to please you, and you were eager to be pleased. I still think that was the secret of your success with young people. You often thought them a little more able than they really were, but those who had any stuff in them at all tried to be as good as you thought them, to come up to your expectations. You had such a spirit of youth yourself that yo
u knew how to strike a spark in young writers. We must talk over those years of comradeship when we meet again.
Until then, good luck to your book! And please wish me good luck with mine—just now it seems to me rather stupid.
Affectionately always,
Willa Cather
TO ELSIE CATHER
June 21 [1933]
Dear Sister;
Everything went well—Virginia graduated cum laude. I tried to do my whole duty—lunched with her and her dear friend Miss [Charlotte] Wilder (who seems a very nice person, awfully like her brother [Thornton Wilder]) paid a visit to Baldwin House and the house-mistress, etc. We stayed in a suite at Faculty House, Mount Holyoke, as it is quiet there. Virginia had dinner with us at the [George and Harriet] Whichers, who recalled your visit and begged to be remembered to you.
Virginia left with us as far as Springfield; from there she went on to Detroit. She seems a rather sad little figure to me—I wish I could do something to cheer her up. But these days most young people seem sad to me.
Your good letter reached me via Virginia—she came over to Mt. Holyoke to dine with us the night we got there, came over in Mary Lewis’ car.
With love,
W.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
June 22 [1933]
My Dearest Dorothy:
At last the Herald Tribune article did reach me, and I sent it straight to Isabelle. A reply has just reached me. Both she and Jan are delighted with it. Isabelle says she wishes to see you to tell you how much she likes it. She would certainly be the hardest person in the world to please in such a matter, so I think we may say “a good job” without reservation. As for me, there is nothing in it that I don’t like, and much that I do, and I’m very grateful to have so good a front presented to the public. To me, myself, articles about myself never give me much delight, no matter how sympathetic and generous they are, simply because they make me for the moment self-conscious. My chief happiness (probably yours, too) is in forgetting the past as if it had never been. No, I don’t mean ‘the past’, but myself in the past. As soon as I think of myself as a human figure in that past, in those scenes (Red Cloud, Colorado, New Mexico) the scenes grow rather dim and are spoiled for me. When I remember those places I am not there at all, as a person. I seem to have been a bundle of enthusiasms and physical sensations, but not a person. Maybe everyone is like that. How can anyone really see himself? He can see a kind of shadow he throws, but not the real creature. I have been running away from myself all my life (have you?) and have been happiest when I was running fastest. Those last three winters of my mother’s life held me close to myself and to the beginnings of things, and it was like being held against things too sad to live with.
