by Willa Cather
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
Greenslet answered that, yes, Houghton Mifflin was still very interested in the “subscription edition” of her works, and asked that she deliver any revisions of the text to him by the fall of 1936 so that they could launch the new edition—eventually called the Autograph Edition—in the fall of 1937. He also approved of Cather’s using her introduction to the Jewett book for her “short book of essays” Not Under Forty, published in 1936. Cather explains the curious title in the preface to the book: “It means that the book will have little interest for people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years.”
The following letter appears to be a transcription made by Knopf staff.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
May 1, 1936
New York City
Dear Alfred,
I was saving my projected title [Not Under Forty] as a surprise for you—possibly a shock. You see I think that to call a book of essays by any of the conventional titles such as Personalities and Opinions is foolish. Essays are dull enough anyhow. I have the hope that these papers are less dull than most, because they are mostly accounts of personal adventures with very individual literary personalities. However such a title would not be very satisfactory, as the best paper among them is certainly the one called The Novel Demeuble.
You would be much more reconciled to this title if you had gone through the text of the various essays. But you want a description of the book immediately and the paper on Thomas Mann [“ ‘Joseph and His Brothers’ ” ] will not be finished and properly typed before the week after next. There will be, I fear, only five essays in all, and of these you have read only the one on Mme. Groux [“A Chance Meeting”]. It will have to be a small book and I suppose you would want to sell it at a dollar. I haven’t the least idea to just how many words it will run, because this request for information for the catalogue has come suddenly. I had expected to give you an estimate of the length of the text, i.e., number of words, about the middle of May. I don’t suppose you will need to know about details of that kind for the catalogue. I hope that Mrs. Kenyon may be able to convert you to this title for the essays. But if you think it really too outrageous I will, of course, listen to reason. Please think it over when you get back and call me up.
Yours,
[No signature]
In the spring of 1936 Annie Pavelka, Cather’s old friend and the prototype for Ántonia in Cather’s novel, wrote Cather thanking her for the Christmas check that she used to purchase a washing machine.
TO ANNIE PAVELKA
May 19, 1936
My dear Annie:
I have not written you because I have not been very well for the last five months and have been pretty badly overworked, trying to keep my business affairs afloat. But when I am not well, I especially enjoy letters from my old friends and your last one gave me great satisfaction, although not all the news was good. I am so happy that you got an electric washing machine with the $55 I sent you at Christmas. But the full price of the washer was $65, and I want to pay for it all. Therefore, I am enclosing a check for $10 to make up to you what you paid out, and now you can call it “Willie’s Washer”. You know, I am not very fond of my real name, Willa, and I always am pleased when Carrie and Mary Miner, and the people who knew me when I was little, call me “Willie,” as my mother and father did. Nowhere else in the world do people call me by that name—just a few of the older people about Red Cloud.
In a few days, you will receive from me a box of winter clothing, which I do not need any more. One dress (the one with the plaid waist), I wore only twice, as I was ill then and not going out much. The striped silk dress (which looks like seersucker but is really silk), I think you may be able to wear yourself for Sunday best. However, I want you to dispose of these dresses just as you wish, and to give suitable ones to the daughters who have been the nicest to you. I have a good many little nieces to send clothes to, or I would send more to your nice girls. I always pray for your good health, just as I pray the Lord to send rain to Nebraska.
Your faithful friend,
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
July 18 [1936]
Dear Alfred;
I am more than pleased that Herr [Thomas] Mann liked my remarks about his wonderful book, and am grateful to you for sending me the excerpt from his letter. The weather has been so fine here that I have been out of doors most of the time with my dear little Wyoming nieces [Margaret and Elizabeth Cather, who were visiting Grand Manan]. (Nineteen is a grand age: I enjoy being in its company.) They leave the island on Monday, and I shall miss them terribly. I wish I could keep them all summer, but they have to go home for the wedding of an older sister.
Here are the contracts, in a queer envelope. Please ask Miss Rubin to send me half-a-dozen legal-size envelopes—none procurable on this island.
Mrs. [Sigrid] Undset’s book has not come yet—but packages are always slow.
Please embrace Blanche for me, and tell her I shall write her as soon as I am nieceless.
Yours always
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
August 12 [1936]
Dear Alfred;
Thank you very much for the books you sent me some time ago. Mrs. Undset’s book [Gunnar’s Daughter] is surely one of her best—there is something awfully fine and fateful about it. It reads like a translation of a fine narrative poem—grandly Norse.
Conrad Richter is surely a man worth watching. When he writes of things that really interest him his sentences have a thrill, they flash into pictures, have a certain tone color. All this means of course that he has some real imagination,—and some red blood.
But I don’t think you will ever get anything very interesting from Miss [Dorothy] Thomas. She has none of Richter’s qualities. She never gets a thrill out of anything, never has any unusual perception or feeling. Dull, plodding, lifeless prose, as if she were packing a trunk for someone else, and trying conscientiously to put everything in. There is no fire in her, and no imagination. She says everything in the flattest possible way. Take a single sentence like that at top of this page of Richter’s book [Early Americana and Other Stories]; Miss Thomas could never write a sentence like that, though its only merit is that the man saw something with interest and told it vividly. He is alive and writes with some vitality. You can’t find one paragraph in her book [The Home Place] like that one—which, after all, merely communicates information about a dry autumn. She is of the [Ruth] Suckow breed, but much more limited.
If you have Mrs. Undset’s “The Ax” and “The Snake Pit” in the old edition, not the one volume edition, will you please send them up to me?
I’ll rush the page proofs back to you if they are sent properly by mail and reach me promptly.
I hope you and Pat had a splendid vacation.
Yours
W.S.C.
The sentences at the top of this page in Richter’s Early Americana and Other Stories (Knopf, 1936) read, “Before September the summer springs on the plain had dried up. The clear, running stream in Red Draw stopped flowing and turned up to the sun its light-colored sand like a dead snake’s belly.”
TO ZOË AKINS
August 30 [1936]
Dear Zoë—
Thank you with all my heart for writing me about Jobyna [Howland]. I hadn’t heard of her death and might not have heard for months. O Zoe, don’t you sometimes wish we had been born in a kinder and less “progressive” age than this, when people lived closer together and stayed at home more and had a deeper and less scattered life? So many sad and bitter things are happening to my old friends in Nebraska that I can’t feel very happy. I can send them canned fruit and vegetables and checks to buy clothes and fuel, but I can’t bring their dead trees and ruined pasture land back to life. These five terrible years of utter drouth and frightful heat h
ave ruined their farms and their health. In my own town [there were] two months when the heat did not drop below 100 for a single day, and went as high as 117, usually about 110! I feel wicked to be up here in this green flowery island in the north and to be wearing sweaters almost every day. Since I wrote you I’ve not been awfully well, but I think it’s worry about my old friends that takes the enjoyment out of me. Keep well, my dear, and enjoy life—as you have a blessed gift for doing. One’s life is all one has, and I want yours to be long and happy. You’ll miss Jobyna, but I’m so glad she died on an up-grade and never went all to pieces as I had a fear she might do. And to think of her business affairs being in good order! Jobyna was always wiser than she let on to be—except about alcohol. Why do people guzzle, when a little wine is so good?
This is not a letter, dear, but a note to thank you for writing me at once. These days I dread a pen like a red hot poker.
Lovingly
Willa
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
August 12 [1936]
My Darling Twinnies;
My rose is a curtain of bloom, from root to tip, and the hollyhocks are going strong. Now the golden rod on the edge of the cliffs waves against a purple sea, all the way up to the High Place. Last week the moon rose further and further north every night, first over the tip of fishhead, and finally right in front of our door—came up out of the water like a battered old copper kettle as it grew more and more lop-sided. It made such a bright, narrow path right to the foot of our cliff that one was tempted to walk across it. The weather here has been wonderful—blue and gold every day, with good rains at night.
Our lawn is very green now, and the monkshood makes a violet hedge against the gray house. It is so mild now, the weather, that we can sit out in our steamer chairs after dinner. The fire places have not been lit for a week. Mrs. Beal & Ralph [Beal] are here cleaning house today, and I am now writing in the attic. We read the proofs of the new book last week.
On Saturday we walked to Bright Angels, but no sweet twin did follow. We both miss you very much and often wish you were here. On Friday Miss [Winifred] Bromhall came for tea. She and Miss Jordan and Miss Glenning[?] and many others wish to be remembered to you—they also miss you. You must both come here again, my dears, before you do any desperate thing like getting married. If we all three wish it, we can make it come true. Next time it must be in August, when all the flowers are out, and the water warm enough to bathe in, and the whales due to arrive. The morning you left we got up early and waited on the shore, but we couldn’t even see the boat. I wish your father and mother could have come on by airplane and dropped down on us while you were here. Perhaps they can, next time, and we can go to the Wolves and out to Gannet Light. Tomorrow we go to Southern Head if it is fine, and I shall remember the happy day we had there with you.
A world of love to you, my dears, from your
Aunt Willie
The following is the only known surviving full letter from Cather to Edith Lewis.
TO EDITH LEWIS
Sunday 4:30 P.M. [October 5, 1936]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Darling Edith;
I am sitting in your room, looking out on the woods you know so well. So far everything delights me. I am ashamed of my appetite for food, and as for sleep—I had forgotten that sleeping can be an active and very strong physical pleasure. It can! It has been for all of three nights. I wake up now and then, saturated with the pleasure of breathing clear mountain air (not cold, just chill air) of being up high with all the woods below me sleeping, too, in still white moonlight. It’s a grand feeling.
Edith Lewis, left, with Willa Cather in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 1926 (photo credit 9.3)
One hour from now, out of your window, I shall see a sight unparalleled—Jupiter and Venus both shining in the golden-rosy sky and both in the West; she not very far above the horizon, and he about mid-way between the zenith and the silvery lady planet. From 5:30 to 6:30 they are of a superb splendor—deepening in color every second, in a still-daylight-sky guiltless of other stars, the moon not up and the sun gone down behind Gap-mountain; those two alone in the whole vault of heaven. It lasts so about an hour (did last night). Then the Lady, so silvery still, slips down into the clear rose colored glow to be near the departed sun, and imperial Jupiter hangs there alone. He goes down about 8:30. Surely it reminds one of Dante’s “eternal wheels”. I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures. If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things—because we can wonder.
I have worn my white silk suit almost constantly with no white hat, which is very awkward. By next week it will probably be colder. Everything you packed carried wonderfully—not a wrinkle.
And now I must dress to receive the Planets, dear, as I won’t wish to take the time after they appear—and they will not wait for anybody.
Lovingly
W.
I don’t know when I have enjoyed Jupiter so much as this summer.
In 1934 Warner Brothers released a second film based on A Lost Lady, this one a rather freely adapted talkie starring Barbara Stanwyck. Cather’s views on adaptation began to harden about this time, and she forbade dramatic adaptation of her works for the rest of her life and in her will.
TO ZOË AKINS
December 15 [1936]
My Very Dear Zoë; (et tu, Brute!)
Please explain to Mr. [Daniel] Totheroh that if I would not allow an old friend like you to make a play of one of my books (and I wouldn’t!) there is not much likelihood that I would let anyone else do it. I long ago made my decision about the question of dramatization, and it is absolute and final. Until I write a very different sort of novel, I shall never have one dramatized. I need make no explanation beyond the fact that I don’t wish “A Lost Lady” dramatized. The legal aspect of my position I looked up long ago (Mr. Totheroh is by no means the first enthusiastic applicant) and I am, as you probably know, absolutely protected. The former sale of screen rights does not in anyway break down my ownership of the book. I am heartily sorry the young man wasted his time and energy, but he should not have built his bungalow on my land before informing himself whether it was for rent or for sale.
I will hold the ms. if you are coming on in January, as I am afraid I have defaced some pages by scrawling comments on the margins; these I will explain to you, and you can pass them on to the young man if you wish. I hear from several sources that he is [a] very fine fellow, and intelligent. This is a business letter, and I must be brief. There are a good many demands made on me, you know.
Devotedly always
W.S.C.
TO ZOË AKINS
Sunday [December 20, 1936]
New York City
My Very Dear Zoë;
I meant to write you a non business letter at once after I sent the other, but I’ve been overwhelmed by things.
No, I am not cross with you! I never have been. It would take a good deal to make me that. You simply let your natural kindness blind your judgment this time. The play you sent me is a stupid piece of work. If you aren’t coming soon, I’ll try to write you why I think so. This fellow never had the faintest idea of what Mrs. Forrester was like. Her lines are as common as mud—except when he quotes.
But I certainly don’t hold his dumbness against you! That would be too petty.
Forgive this hurried scrawl, my dear. Alfred Knopf is sailing in a few days, suddenly, and a lot of business matters have come up to be arranged before he goes. The Christmas rush is on, and all the demands that one’s family makes at this season. So forgive me if my letter sounded curt. I never feel annoyed with you. You have always been one of my real comforts, and one of the few people, of the very few people whom I trust. Wish me a happy Christmas in bed, and I’ll come up smiling!
Yours
W.
PART TEN
Year
s of Grieving
1937–1939
As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer. But it will break me in the end.
—WILLA CATHER TO ROSCOE CATHER, November 6, 1938
Willa Cather on Grand Manan Island, 1930s (photo credit 10.1)
IN 1937, Cather started writing a novel based in family lore that would challenge her artistry in new ways: Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Writing this book, set in antebellum Virginia, sent her both mentally and literally back to the region of her earliest childhood. She would need to conduct research—as she had many other times in her writing career—and learn as much as she could about the history of slavery and the lives of slaves in the American South, then write as empathetically and convincingly as she could about African American life. The writing of the novel was interrupted, however, by two devastating personal losses: her brother Douglass’s death of a heart attack in 1938 and the death of Isabelle McClung Hambourg, her longtime friend and one of the great loves of her life, only a few months later after a long illness. These deaths, combined with the dark news of the rise of Nazism and the beginning of World War II in Europe, meant that the 1930s ended bleakly for Cather.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
January 7, 1937
My dear Roscoe:
Was there ever anybody who could always throw the monkey-wrench into the machine and add a spray of cypress to the holly wreath, like our sister Elsie? She wrote me from Casper that she was having such a delightful visit: I turned the page and on the other side, she says, “I am doubly glad to be here for if Roscoe is going to leave Casper as he intends, it may be many years before I see him again.”
Now please tell me, where do you propose going—Alaska or South America or Tahiti? Even from Tahiti I get letters from James Norman Hall, who implores me to come to visit him and says it isn’t a hard trip. Please enlighten me about your plans, my dear boy.
