by Willa Cather
You probably do not realize, Edith, how much it pleased her that you took the trouble to come down to New York and see her several times when she was in the hospital. Her uncle Will’s going to Cherry Valley to see her was another thing that warmed her heart—she could never speak of it without tears.
Poor Jan; I am very impatient with him sometimes—he is so impractical in some things, but Heaven knows he loved and admired Isabelle every day they lived together, and that was her one great solace in the cares and anxieties and suffering that she lived through during these last twelve years. I think I can say that she was never really unhappy, and I know that she had times of great happiness. She made many warm and beautiful friendships, and even on the date of her last letter, September 24th, she was still loving life. You can understand that living will never be the same for me again. I don’t yet know where I am or what kind of future there will be for me in a world in which there is no Isabelle to write to or to go to. It will take me a long while to get used to things as they are now.
I have written at greater length than I intended, Edith, and I will ask you to regard this letter as confidential to you. I don’t wish to be telling more about Isabelle than she would have told about herself. To anyone who truly loved her you might wish to quote from this letter, but not to anyone else, please. Near of kin are not always kind of heart. I feel sure she would not wish her cousins, the Lees, to know anything about her life, though she was very fond of their mother, her “Aunt Beck”. I know she was truly fond of her cousin Mary Griswold (?) I am not sure about the name, though I remember the girl very well. I think she and her brothers now live in Florida.
Sincerely yours
Willa Cather
TO ROSCOE CATHER
November 6 [1938]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Dear Brother;
How can I help worrying when you let yourself be carved up by a smooth talking insurance man? The surgeon whom I consulted in N.Y. said quietly that your hemorrhages were the result of bad technique or bad judgment, probably both, on the part of your doctor. You would have saved time in the end, and much vitality, if you had gone to the Mayo Clinic where thousands of similar operations have taught the men to guard against possible consequences, and where the surgeons aren’t looking for operations but looking toward the long afterwards. I have a hard appendix, but they refused to operate because it would take too much out of my vitality and working power. For the same reason they refused to remove Dorothy Canfield’s very disfiguring goitre.
Your one fault, my dear boy, (the only one I know of) is that you have always been too willing to trust people—you think too well of them. It’s an engaging fault. I don’t mind when it concerns your mind and estate, but for heaven’s sake dont let the persuasive talkers practice on your body. You have but one, you know. You are trusting the ability of your two well-meaning brothers much too far, I think. But that concerns only money losses, it doesn’t endanger your life.
I am up here alone at this hotel in the woods where I have done most of my best work and where the proprietors are so kind to me. I finished “Antonia” here, finished “A Lost Lady” and began the “Archbishop”. The best part of all the better books was written here. It was Isabelle who first brought me here. You cannot imagine what her death means to me. It came just four months after Douglass’ death, before I had got my nerves steady again. No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years, as she did. 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. I feel as if I couldn’t go another step. People say I have a “classic style”. A few of them know it’s the heat under the simple words that counts. I early learned that if you loved your theme enough you could be as mild as a May morning and still make other people care—people in countries who read it in the strangest languages—Hungarian and Roumanian are the latest. Some day you must come and see my whole bookcase full of translations. It’s the one thing that simple really caring for an old Margie, an old cat, an old anything. I never cultivated it, from the age of twenty on I did all I could to repress it, and that effort of mind did, after years, give me a fairly good “style”—style being merely the writer, no the person himself; what he was born with and what he has done for himself. Isabelle watched me every step of the way. But the source of supply seems to be getting low. I work a little every day (1½ hrs.) to save my reason, to escape from myself. But the sentences don’t come sharp and clear as they used to—the pictures are a little blurred. Perhaps it’s fatigue only—I hope so. This book [Sapphira and the Slave Girl] has been twice interrupted by death, and twice by illness. I keep it up not for the book itself, but for the peace it brings me to follow old activities that used to be so happy—so rapid and so absolutely absorbing.
Goodbye dear. I’ve not written so long a letter in a long time—except to Isabelle’s poor devoted and now desolate husband.
W.
TO MARGARET CATHER SHANNON
Wednesday [probably November 9, 1938]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire
[Written in the top margin:] The Parker House is where I always stop—very picturesque part of Boston.
Yes, little Dear; I am here, and hope to be all this month. I want to be alone as long as I can. That is the only way I can pull out of things. You see there are some people one loves and is proud of, as I was of Douglass. Then there are some people who have been a part of one’s inner and outer life for so long that one does not know how to go forward without them. Thirty eight years ago Isabelle McClung, Judge [Samuel A.] McClung’s daughter, took me into her father’s comfortable well-ordered house in Pittsburgh. I was a poor schoolteacher, at sixty dollars a month, living in a boarding house. I was a raw, densely ignorant, but very happy girl from the west—found everything jolly. I knew something about books. Isabelle knew very little about books, but everything about gracious and graceful living. We brought each other up. We kept on doing that all our lives. For most of my life in Pittsburgh (five years) Isabelle and, I think, your father, were the only two people who thought there was any good reason for my trying to write—was it merely an excuse for not getting married? Isabelle has always been my best and soundest critic,—in some ways better than Edith, who knows much more about the technique of writing. I have sent Isabelle every manuscript before I published [part missing?] were always invaluable. Her husband is returning to me three hundred of my letters which she carried about with her from place to place all the time. She had lived abroad for fourteen years, but I often went to her, and in mind we were never separated. Now we have no means of communication; that is all. One can never form such a friendship twice. One does not want to. As long as she lived, her youth and mine were realities to both of us.
Goodbye, my precious girl, be young, be happy, as my Yehudi and Nola are.
Lovingly
W.S.C.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
Sunday, December 25 [1938]
My Dear Roscoe;
Potted plants kept coming in all day yesterday until the apartment was full of them. Then we went tea with the Menuhins at five. When I came home at seven, for dinner, a box from Irene Hays, the very smartest New York florist was on my desk. “Yehudi, of course: he often sends me flowers from there[”]. When I opened the box I took out the richest purple violets I have seen this winter—and your card. I simply burst into tears. It was instantaneous. Disappointment? Exactly the opposite. Surprise and delight. It was an emotion made up of many things. One’s family do not see one in a “romantic” light. That is natural. Douglass always sent me a gunny sack full of walnuts at Christmas time. It was nice of him. But no man of my own family ever sent me flowers before, and though flowers come to me so many, so many and so often, these violets broke me all up for a moment—and filled me with a strange kind of pride. They were on my breakfast table this morning, and are before me on my table as I write. My pleasure seems out
of proportion to the cause. But the cause is everything; from the days when we used to sleep up in the old attic with the snow blowing in, and listen to trains whistle in that bitter cold air, and it matters more to me to have you throw me a bouquet than to have all the other flowers that come to me on my birthday and Christmas. You brought back to me something of Christmases long ago, when I had so much hope—and so little to found it on. But we three older ones did love each other, and we found life pretty thrilling when we went to the South Ward school.
A Happy New Year, dear, to you and Meta.
Willie
[On back of envelope:] Please let me know where you will be two weeks from now.
Cather’s claims about her early stories in the following letter are not backed up by any available evidence and are likely fabrications constructed to convince Wagenknecht to leave her alone. When “A Death in the Desert” was published in 1903, she had already published thirty-two other short stories and hundreds of articles and reviews; it was hardly the “first published story which was altogether my own work.”
TO EDWARD WAGENKNECHT
December 31, 1938
My dear Mr. Wagenknecht:
Thank you for your kind words about the Autograph Edition. I think Mr. [Bruce] Rogers did a very fine piece of work—indeed, he never does anything that has not distinction.
I never received the copy of the Sewanee Review. I was abroad during most of ’29 and ’30, and my publishers cannot forward second class mail to me. There is too much of it.
Now to the object of your letter. You will see that in returning the list you sent me I have crossed out six of the early stories you attribute to me, because they are not really genuine; some of them are wholly spurious. I cannot give you the history of each of these, but let us take the first one, “On the Divide”. It was a college theme written for a weekly theme class. The professor was a very young man, just out of college himself, and was one of those mistaken young men who think they can reflect credit upon their department by rushing their students into print. As the Overland Monthly did not pay for contributions, he was able to get it printed there. Before he sent it there, he touched it up very considerably and added what he called “color”. My theme was a short account of a Swede farmer who carried off a girl in a storm. I forget now how much the professor added, but I remember I was amazed when he attributed to this Swede some skill in wood carving—said he did this in his lonely hours, or something of that sort. I have only the dimmest recollection of this theme, but I remember that he put in several high spots which amazed me. Incidently, he had the story printed quite without my knowledge. I was not in the least offended, and thought he had been very kind to dress up a dull college theme.
The story “Eldorado” [“El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional”], though it was written much later, was sent to the same professor and highly retouched by him. He was older by that time, and so was I,—but we were neither of us any wiser. I will say for myself however, that I had no intention of publishing the story. It was the result of a kind of correspondence course which I kept up with this young man after I left college. The other stories which I have marked out as wholly or partially spurious, were the collective effort of a club of four youngsters, of whom I was one, who worked on Pittsburgh newspapers. The reason that the stories were sent about under my name was that, thanks to the young professor to whom I have just referred, I had had several stories printed in magazines while the other members had not. The New England Magazine did not pay for contributions, any more than did the Overland Monthly, so there were no profits to be shared. I had almost entirely forgotten about this little club of newspaper youngsters, but we had a jolly time collaborating, and the results, though worthless enough, did nobody any harm.
The first published story which was altogether my own work was “A Death in the Desert”, published in Scribner’s. I forget the date. The remaining titles on your list, beginning with 1907, are all protected by copyright, which I am very careful to renew at proper intervals, as I wish to keep the stories out of print. They are all immature work, most of them carelessly written in the intervals of very exacting editorial work. I became an editor on the staff of McClure’s magazine in 1907, and managing editor in 1908. Several attempts have been made to print collections of these stories by small publishing houses in the West, but we have always been able to prevent it. An instructor in one of the western colleges had several of the stories made up in mimeograph sheets, which he used in his class room. But some copies were circulated outside the class room, and I was able to stop it and have all mimeograph copies destroyed. In many states the law rules that any form of reproducing a writer’s work without the writer’s consent is a form of publishing. I do not know what the law may be on this point in the State of Washington, and I do sincerely hope that I shall not have occasion to ask my attorney to investigate.
My dear Professor Wagenknecht, your quotation from the publisher who put out the early essays of George Eliot is simply a publisher’s salesman talk. There is no interest or profit for any “scholar” in examining immature and labored productions. There is no profit in it even for this sales-talking publisher. When an American publisher put out a volume of Kipling’s very early work which had run out of copyright, he made nothing on it at all—I believe he lost money.
I am sorry to say that I cannot by any twist of thinking, construe your wish to call attention to these long forgotten stories, signed with my name, as a friendly wish.
It seems to me a rather indelicate proceeding on your part. I cannot imagine myself doing such a thing with Mr. Hemingway’s early work, for instance.
Suppose I were an apple grower, and, packing my year’s crop, I were very careful to put only the apples I thought reasonably sound into the packing boxes, leaving the defective ones in a pile on the ground. While I am asleep or at dinner, a neighbour comes to the orchard and puts all the worthless apples into the boxes that are to go to market. Would you call that a friendly action, or the neighbour a friendly man? Writing is subject to outside conditions; to drought, crow-peckings, wasps, hail storms, just as much as apples are. The honest writer, like the honest fruit grower, sorts his work over and tries to keep only what is fairly sound. Everyone has that right of supervision over their handiwork—the carpenter, the dressmaker, the cabinetmaker. He can put his flimsy work in his cellar and forget it, and our copyright laws give the writer the same privilege.
Very truly yours,
Willa Cather
TO ROSCOE CATHER
[Probably January 1939]
No, my dear Roscoe, it was not business trouble that I meant to write you about when I asked where you would be in January. Sometimes I wish to speak to you “personally”, as you do to me in your letter which just came.
Since I have lost Isabelle there is now no one to whom I can show things to—no one who will take pleasure in pleasant recognition that comes my way. Of course Alfred Knopf is always interested, but he takes the lofty stand that whatever I do is pretty good, and it’s no matter what people say, while to me it does matter what some people say. People like Tweedsmuir [John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir]—because his book on Augustus Caesar [Augustus] seems to me the best piece of historical writing that has come along in years, and because he is a finished scholar.
The Swedish review is a fine piece of critical work because it tells exactly why the book was written as it was; the low tone, the respectful distance which I tried to keep between the characters and myself. And he is equally good on [D. H.] Lawrence, whom I knew very well.
So if you are not too busy, I would like to send you such things from time to time. The Menuhins are like Alfred—they think high praise comes naturally to me, as to them. A few years ago Yehudi told a reporter that his favorite authors were Victor Hugo and Willa Cather!
But you know it’s a long road from Red Cloud to any sort of finish.
Look the enclosures over when you have leisure and a good cigar, and when you and Meta have read th
em, mail them back to me, registered post.
Lovingly
Willie
TO BURGES JOHNSON
January 12, 1939
My dear Mr. Johnson:
Certainly, you may quote anything you wish from “Not Under Forty” and anything you select from my letter to “Pat” Knopf, provided you don’t select a statement that is too informal or rather exaggerated. I don’t remember now just how informal my letter was, but I remember that I gave him my real reasons for writing “The Professor’s House” in the form I did. I thought the unusual structure was sufficiently bound together by the fact that the Professor’s life with Tom Outland was just as real and vivid to him as his life with his family, and because Tom Outland was in the Professor’s house so much during his student life. He and the atmosphere he brought with him became really a part of the house—that is, of the old house which the Professor could not altogether leave. If I had happened to write the book in a very modernistic manner, letting everybody’s thoughts and memories and shades of feeling tumble into the book helter-skelter, I could have made a rather exciting color study. But the trouble is, these stunts, while they are very exciting, seem to leave nothing behind—no after taste for the writer. They go up, and out, like rockets.
