by Willa Cather
Hastily, but with all my love,
Willie
Cyril Clemens wrote Cather in 1936 asking about her 1902 visit with poet A. E. Housman. In her reply, Cather wondered how he knew about it and dismissed its importance. Ford Madox Ford, in his 1932 memoir Return to Yesterday, had jocularly told a false story that Cather, as president of the Pittsburgh Shropshire Lad Club, found Housman in Cambridge and delivered a golden wreath to him.
TO CYRIL CLEMENS
January 30, 1937
Dear Mr. Clemens:
Are you sure it was in the Forum that you saw the article which you quote? I thought it was published in the Saturday Review, and it was written by the Prince of Prevaricators, Ford Maddox Ford.—Not a word of truth in it! I am sure that no group of ladies from Pittsburgh ever went to see Mr. Housman—and still more sure that I never headed such a group. When I met him it was not at his rooms in Cambridge, or in Cambridge at all. There was no golden wreath. It was simply an afternoon of conversation—conversation chiefly about other things than Mr. Housman’s verses.
I have been greatly annoyed by this matter, Mr. Clemens, and have been besieged by demands to ‘tell what I know about Housman’. In short, I am paying a heavy price for a very brief acquaintance. Alfred Knopf (who publishes More Poems) and I talked the matter over and he has suggested that at some time, probably in the distant future, I should write a very exact account of my afternoon with Housman, in much the same informal manner that I have used in the book of essays recently published under the title Not Under Forty. These essays are scrupulously truthful accounts of accidental meetings with very interesting people. This promise to Mr. Knopf will protect me from the almost threatening demands that have been made by a number of people. One’s memories, after all, are one’s own, and if one relates them to the public one prefers to do it in one’s own way.
When I last wrote you about this matter I had determined never to give out any account of my impressions of Mr. Housman. But since so many false stories (like the one you quote on your postcard) have been started, I shall probably some day, when I am not so busy as I am now, write a statement of the very brief and simple facts.
Sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
TO ZOLTAN ENGEL
February 20, 1937
My dear Mr. Engel:
Please accept my heartiest thanks for the beautiful medallion of Rudyard Kipling which you have been gracious enough to send me. I have seen few portrait medallions which seem to me so successful, and it will be a great addition to my collection.
You ask me whether I know of any colleges that would be grateful for a medallion of Kipling: I am afraid I do not. I am led to believe that just at present most colleges would be more interested in a portrait medallion of Mr. T. S. Eliot!
Thanking you again for your kindness, I remain
Cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO META SCHAPER CATHER
February 20, 1937
Dear Meta:
Roscoe may still be in the far west, in which case I beg a favor of you. If a package or any letters, addressed to me, come to you from the enclosed address, please forward them to me. This George Seibel is a Pittsburgh editor, and is one of the most persistent and tormenting of all my many curses.
Hastily, but with love to you all,
Willa
TO GEORGE SEIBEL
February 22, 1937
My dear Mr. Seibel:
I am glad to say that I haven’t any New York address at present. I go to New York several times each year, but I stop at a different hotel every time. Just at present I am on my way to visit my brother in Wyoming. Anything you may wish to send me will eventually reach me if you will address it in care of—
Mr. R. C. Cather,
1225 N. Center Street,
Casper, Wyoming.
I am sorry to say that I have heard nothing of Francis Hill for many years.
I am delighted to hear that you and Mrs. Seibel are both well. As for me, I am well—whenever I am not in New York. The air there is so filled up with gasoline that a country bred person cannot get enough oxygen to breathe.
With best wishes always,
Willa Cather
The following letter was written in response to a public debate in the pages of the Saturday Review of Literature between the critics Bernard DeVoto and Edmund Wilson, particularly DeVoto’s article “My Dear Edmund Wilson,” published in the February 13, 1937, issue.
TO BERNARD DEVOTO
March 10, 1937
Dear Mr. De Voto:
This letter is not for publication, and writing to editors is certainly not a habit of mine.
But I find that after several weeks have gone by I still feel a wish to thank you for your letter to Mr. Edmund Wilson, which appeared in the Review some time ago. I say thank you advisedly, because in that letter you stated clearly things that I have felt very strongly and have never been able to formulate, even to myself. One knows that our actual lives are very little made up of economic conditions. They affect us on the outside, but they certainly are not what life means to you or to me or to the taxi driver, or to the elevator boys and hall boys (all of whom I know very well) in the house where I live. Theories of economic reform and social reconstruction really seem to interest nobody very much—except the men who write about them and the men who have made it a profession to be interested in them. Most, if not all of these students who burn with zeal to reconstruct and improve human society, seem to lose touch with human beings and with the individual needs and desires which make people what they are.
You probably remember that as an empiricist Tolstoi went even further than you go in your letter to Mr. Wilson. After spending most of his life in pondering how to make life better for men of high and low estate, he decided that the European desire to organize society efficiently was a mistake. And he repeats down through the years that “the state of a man’s mind has always been more important to him than the conditions of his life. It seems as if there were some antithesis between efficient organization and the best there is in mankind; as though, in a highly organized, extremely efficient society, men cease to think truly or feel deeply.” Of course, Tolstoi tried to be a Marxist and failed; of course, he is very much out of date and out of fashion now, but certainly no one ever took the puzzle of human life more to heart or puzzled over it more agonizingly,—not even the New Republic.
It quite heartens one to have a man come out and say frankly, as you did, that it seems natural to regard the world immediately about one as made up of individuals rather than of “masses”: and that human history and human experience, and the human needs we know to be strongest in ourselves and in our friends, make the most reliable data we have as to what really comprises happiness and well-being in individuals and large collections of individuals.
Please excuse me if I seem to be trying to write your editorial back at you, for I know very well I could not improve upon it.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
When the Canadian critic E. K. Brown sent Cather his essay “Willa Cather and the West” from the University of Toronto Quarterly, she was favorably impressed.
TO E. K. BROWN
April 9, 1937
My dear Mr. Brown:
I recently returned from a long absence, and among the many reviews and articles awaiting me I find your interesting and very friendly pamphlet. You have certainly brought a friendly and unprejudiced mind to my books, and though I do not always agree with you I am interested in all your opinions.
I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live. The places in which he has lived do, to a certain extent, color his mind. But to me the Kipling of Captains Courageous is just as vigorous and keen and full of his subject, as the Kipling of the early Indian stories.
You say that
the Southwest of the Archbishop is not so much my country as the West of Nebraska. I think in your zeal to make your case, you have fallen into error. I knew the Southwest early, and knew it long and well. I did not write about it earlier for one reason only: the Southwest is so essentially and at its roots a Catholic country, that it seemed to me no Protestant could handle material properly. (You understand that I am speaking here of the real Southwest, the Mexicans and the Indians and the workers on the railroads. I am not speaking of the tourists and cheap artists and dude ranches which have infested that country and overwhelmed it since I first knew it.)
To go back to the other side of my parenthesis, I waited fifteen years for some Roman Catholic to write a book about the real New Mexicans, their religion and country, and some of those early French missionary priests who left such a fragrant tradition of tolerance and insight and kindly sympathy. Isn’t it possible after all, that one may admire quite as sincerely a man of Father Latour’s type as a man of Father Vaillant’s? I am asking you to read a letter which I wrote concerning the actual writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. You will find it on this page in the pamphlet enclosed.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
I must apologize for the enclosed pamphlet:—it is one my publisher uses as a reply to colleges and clubs who write to him for information.
Willa Cather
The following letter continues a correspondence with Akins about a dramatic adaptation of A Lost Lady that began at the end of 1936.
TO ZOË AKINS
April 19, 1937
My dear Zoë:
You will forgive me if I say [a] word in typewriter about Mr. [Daniel] Totheroh’s play, which I am sending back to you.
Take Mrs. Forrester’s first entrance in Act I. What does she say when she comes into the Judge’s office? My, your stairs are steep! That is what the scrub woman says when she arrives. Did you ever, Zoe, know a woman with any spunk or sparkle who used “my” as an exclamation? I remember a fat old Methodist neighbour who used to drag out “My, but the days are warm, Mr. Cather!” In her first sentence, Zoe, he shows her up for a common, dreary thing. In her next sentence, she refers to her (1) age and to her (2) travelled state! Two things she would never have done. (1. Her particular weakness, 2. Bad taste.)
A little later she trills to this lumping Swede that his little boy’s eyes are “blue as a mountain lake”. Ho-Ho! When she doesn’t talk like a corsetless old Methodist woman, she talks like a darling club woman, and says she “would die” to have such eyes etc. That expression stamps her socially. So does “you can help me out”. Everything she says stamps her socially, except when she brazenly quotes me. She says Niel will be “a great asset” to Sweet Water society. Lord, they needed assets—some future, with Marian as the social leader!
Everything that Niel says is the speech of a cotton-mouthed booby. As to Mrs. Forrester’s smirking about “drinking here alone, with two men”–––the dining-room girls in our little town-hotel might have said that; the commonest King’s Daughter or Eastern Star sister would have refused the sherry, or drunk it and said nothing. On this page, the playwright becomes unbearable because he makes the Judge bring out discreditable insinuations about Captain Forrester. The integrity of the book really rests on Captain Forrester.
My dear Zoë, I read no further than the first act. Nothing could induce me. The language he puts in Mrs. Forrester’s mouth shows that he hadn’t the least idea of the kind of woman she was. I snatched up the book, which I hadn’t read for years. I could find no excuse for him. As you know, Mrs. Forrester was done from life, an absolutely truthful portrait. Her speech was always a delight to me. She never said anything very wise, or even very witty, but her voice and eyes spoke together—it was quick spontaneous staccato, usually a little mocking. She never used bromidic expressions, such as “I hear Niel is back”, or “You can help me out.” One can’t judge what one writes I suppose, but if I let her down and made her talk like a common slut, may I suffer for it!
Zoë, I pray you turn to this page of Act I and see what that rather nice boys’ picnic becomes. Nothing great, those few pages, but something rather fresh and rather genuine about it. And this is what he does with that nice morning!
Now, my dear Zoë, I don’t care how many grand situations he may have built up in the acts I did not read, or how “dramatic” he may be, and I don’t care what might happen to the common woman that he has made of Mrs. Forrester. We’ll forget this episode forever, but I do want you to refer to the passages I have mentioned in the first act and judge as to whether you think I have been unreasonable.
I do thank you for the verses you sent me. Of course, I like the one about your own room very much the best—in fact, I like it very best. The one on Jobyna [Howland] I would like, if you hadn’t put her name under the title. I just, somehow, cannot in my mind connect Jobyna with the out-of-doors or the quiet things of nature. And yet, you know, I liked her very much.
Now that I’ve explained myself a little, my mind is clear of wrath against this young man. It’s the only quarrel [“quarrel” is crossed out] no, discord, that has jarred you and me in so many years—and I’ve been a goose to take it seriously. Forgive me.
With my love to you
Willa
In the spring of 1938, Roscoe Cather wrote his sister at length explaining his impending move to Colusa, California, and his purchase of a bank there.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
May 19 [1937]
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My dear Brother:
I am not a good enough writer to tell you how much I appreciate your long confidential letter with its account of all you have been doing. You put the situation to me so clearly that I feel as if I had been through your adventures with you. I am so glad, oh so glad, that you and Meta are to be released at last from those long, hard Wyoming winters which you have borne so bravely: and that now you are to spend your time in that northern part of California, which to me is so much more beautiful than the southern part. Even though you should not make a great deal of money, it will be a grand move. What can money buy that is so worth while as beautiful country and the pleasant things of every-day life which so often go with beautiful country? Your picture of Colusa seems to me just the sort of town I would like myself. I like everything about northern California, except the fact that there are a great many idle, drifting, shallow people there. Just the kind of people among whom Jim’s wife [Ethel Garber Cather] cuts a simper in the South [of California]. But you and Meta will find your own kind of people, even in California.
I am so glad that you have had this wonderful visit with Douglass. I love to have you two men happy together. Yes, you are quite right; he has more of Father in him than any of us, and he has kept so remarkably young in face and feeling. (But wasn’t it funny that I was the only one who got Father’s hands? And the older I grow, the more they are like his.)
I must say again, dear boy, that nothing could please me more than to know that you and Meta are going to live in a mild climate, and that you are going to be near Douglass. And when I go out to stay with the Menuhins, I can come to visit you. Your town cannot be very far from Los Gatos.
With all my love to you,
Willie
[Written on the back:] I return to N. Y. a week from today.
Pat Knopf ran away from home in the spring of 1937 after learning that he did not get accepted into Princeton, determined to make good before he returned. Police found him hungry and penniless in Salt Lake City, and he came back to New York.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
August 9 [1937]
Grand Manan Island
Dear Alfred;
My Herald-Tribunes come in bunches, and I don’t always open them at once. So for me, Pat was lost, found, returned, all in one bunch of news, like a “continued story”. I’m glad he is back again, but more glad that he ran away. I’m glad he wanted to run away. He has had too much petting, and it’s a
good sign that he felt like kicking it all over. People are always (on your account and because you are a publisher) paying more attention to him than they naturally would to a lad of his age. Their overtures are more potent than your efforts to counteract them: (bad English, but you will understand.) All this wouldn’t matter if the boy were just a silly ass. But there is another side to him, and you’ll agree with me that the other side hasn’t had much chance. We all like flattery, and most young people like to stand out from the crowd and be exceptional. The son of a successful and prominent man always has a hard time. But the only son of a conspicuously original and successful publisher, in these times when every society girl and every school boy wants to “write”—well, he’s pretty nearly damned from childhood. I’ve sometimes wished you’d sent him to school in Switzerland, where his name would not suggest getting next to a publisher. I don’t think you can realize what a handicap “Alfred A. Knopf Inc.” is to him. We’d have to be of heroic [“heroic” is rewritten here three times] mould to stride over it. (I wrote Blanche several weeks ago about getting a black spider sting on my right hand—had a nasty time with it. Now I’m free of bandages, but my hand remains stiff and awkward, as you can see when I have to write the word “heroic” over three times to make it at all decipherable!) I hope you and Blanche didn’t worry too much about Pat’s running away.
My love to you both, and a great deal to Pat—though, I shan’t tell him so.
Devotedly to you all
W.S.C.
P.S. Just a word: why don’t you ask Greenslet to let you see the [crossout] (failed again!) prospectus they are preparing for the subscription edition? A rumor is going round that you have left me, or I have left you.
