The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  May I say, Mr. Johnson, that I am very happy that “Pat” is so interested in his work under you? I think it is a genuine interest. There is good material in “Pat”, but he has been under very poor teachers and had the misfortune in early boyhood to be thrown among a lot of very showy and rather clever people. That is the almost inevitable fate of the only son of a publisher in this particular time. A great many very cheap people come and go in a publisher’s office these day[s], and young lads cannot very well judge which are the wise ones and which are the wisecrackers.

  Very cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  TO YALTAH MENUHIN STIX

  Monday [January 23, 1939]

  New York City

  My darling Yaltah,

  We have had wonderful cold weather and lots of snow. I have been walking around the Reservoir alone—but pleasant memories kept me company. There [are] very few people that I like to walk with—only three whom I like very much to walk with!

  I am overwhelmed with business—trying to keep a very poor French translation of the “Archbishop” from being published in Paris. The Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Slovak ones are said to be very good, so why should the French one be so dull and plodding! Isn’t it stupid!

  My precious, if you have a Bible in the house (and maybe you have the one dear Marutha bought from the agent long ago—so characteristic of her!) anyway, if you have one, please read the First and Second Books of Samuel, so that you can enjoy a beautiful book I am going to send you; J. M. Barrie’s last play “The Boy David”. It failed in London, because nobody there reads the Old Testament now-a-days. But I think you will see how wonderfully Barrie does the future man in the boy. And I think Marutha will love it, too. Maybe you would like to know that, like you, Barrie had a special fondness for the “Archbishop”. I am so glad I was able to interest him (to give him some distraction, I mean) when he was old and ill.

  Goodnight, my dear, my especially dear Yaltah.

  Your Aunt Willa

  P.S.

  Tuesday [January 24, 1939]

  Oh Yaltah, the boy David, the young shepherd, is such an enchanting creature! I have just read the 1st & 2nd Books of Samuel over again with delight. One must have the unadorned facts in one’s mind to see what Barrie was trying to do in his lyrical play. I wish some one would select the best Psalms of David and publish them in a small volume. They are great poetry. No one alive on this earth today can write such poetry.

  TO DAYTON M. KOHLER

  March 16, 1939

  My Dear Mr. Kohler;

  What is the use? Hitler entered Prague last night. President Masaryk was an old friend of mine. He was a scholar and a lover of letters. In my childhood I had many Czech friends. I love their way of life. And what about “British honor”, which I have always believed in? However much we may try to live in a nobler past, this thing has come upon us and lowers our vitality and our wish to live.

  Thank you for your kind and friendly letter. Those books were written in better times than this.

  Sincerely yours

  Willa Cather

  TO ELIZABETH CATHER ICKIS

  March 30 [1939]

  My Darling Elizabeth;

  I am proud as a peacock to be a great aunt! And I am so glad you have named the baby Margaret. Her aunt Margaret was here in this apartment the day after she got the news and was in a flutter of excitement. She so hoped you would name the baby for her, but said it would probably be named for you and Lynn’s [Ickis] mother. She said she didn’t see how she could wait for months to see you and the baby. I should just like to go and see that baby myself! Mary Virginia was here for dinner last night and was thrilled to hear about your having a daughter. Poor little M.V.—I sometimes fear she has had to wait too long to start a family—and worked too hard. It’s a wise girl who marries a man with a job, who can go and “get the little rabbit skin”. Kiss Margaret on her black head for me. I send you a world of love, dear.

  Your Aunt Willie

  TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD

  June 28, 1939

  My dear Carrie:

  You have probably already been surprised by receiving a fat book from the Channel Book Shop. I wanted to send it to you in the early part of last winter, but I thought then you would be getting ready for Christmas. Then I thought I would send it sometime during February or March, but for both of those two months I was too ill with influenza to do anything, and I got so behind in replying to important letters that I have only just now caught up.

  And now it is early summer, when every housekeeper is too busy to read anything. So I’ll just ask you to tuck this book away and read some portions of it next winter, when the days are quiet. I send you the book, of course, because of the rather interesting and original articles on modern writers—though I like the chapters on Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot.

  Two years ago a French scholar at the University of Toulouse wrote a study of all my books, which I want some day to have translated for a few of my American friends. It is some four hundred pages long, and I have been too busy to bother to get a translator for it. But next to that book, I think the short chapter on my books in Margaret Lawrence’s “School of Femininity” is the one I would most like you to read—and to keep. I like the article not chiefly because it is flattering, but because the writer says what she has to say in few words, and without rambling. If there is any real merit in my books, she puts her finger on the root of it. I once sent you a lot of English reviews, and you will remember that even the most enthusiastic reviewers never attempted to say why they got a special pleasure out of this or that book. They talk about “atmosphere”, “style”, “form”, etc., but Miss Lawrence puts it in a very few words. She seems to understand that I can write successfully only when I write about people or places which I very greatly admire; which, indeed, I actually love. The characters may be cranky and queer, or foolhardy and rash, but they must have something in them which gives me a thrill and warms my heart. Now this is something I would never have said myself to anyone, but since Miss Lawrence has said it for me, I want you to have this confession of faith in her words. I hope that both you and Mary will at some time find time to read it, and I hope you will agree with me, that it would not be wise to show it to other people in my home town. I do not believe there is anyone but you and Mary who would not feel a little,—well, a little spiteful, you know. Nevertheless, I would like one person in my home town to have such a clear explanation of the way in which my books really were written, and I would like you to be that person. You, more than any other one person now living, know a great deal of the material that went into some of the books. And those things we will keep to ourselves. They do not belong to the gossips. I have heard that Verna Trine considers herself the original of Lucy Gayheart, and that another so-called friend at home considers that I thought I was writing about myself when I wrote Lucy’s story: that I dressed myself out in brown eyes and red cheeks and a bewitching personality, and quite believe that I was like that! You and I know who the girl was who used to skate in the old rink, dressed in a red jersey. But please tell me, Carrie, did Sadie Becker have golden-brown eyes? The picture was perfectly clear to me when I was writing the book, but since then a queer doubt has come over me, and I sometimes think they were gray! But I can hear her contralto laugh today, as clearly as I did when I was twelve.

  A great many things have happened in my life, dear Carrie, since I last wrote you a long letter. I have often wanted to write, but my heart always failed me. I am now looking at the very spot on the rug where Douglass stood, so big and strong, when he gave me a last hug before he dashed off to catch the plane that took him westward. I want you to know that during the ten days he spent here, we had almost a lifetime of happiness. On my birthday I stuffed the turkey for him myself, because my very excellent French cook could never make the kind of stuffing Grandma Boak used to make, and that was the kind he liked best. A great many flowers always come in on that day, and he sp
ent the afternoon helping me to arrange them. The only interruption in his visit was that I had to send him to the theater alone one evening, because I had an important engagement to dine with an English publisher who was sailing the next day. I bitterly regret that lost evening, but the date had been arranged early in October.

  I have lost many friends within the last few years, but losing Isabelle and Douglass within four months has made me a different person, and I shall never be the same again.

  This past winter was a hard one to live through. The brightest thing in it was the solicitous affection and loyalty of the Menuhin family, and my great happiness in learning to know and truly love Yehudi’s wife. She has all the directness and firmness of her solid Scotch ancestry. She is sweet, yet decided; the more I know her, the more I feel she is right for him in every way. Marriage is apt to make or mar a young artist, but Yehudi has been as fortunate in this as he has been in other things. It was her character and the direct, clear look in her eyes, that first drew him to her. They came to see me when I was ill, and when I was well we were often together, the three of us. I loved being with the two of them almost more than I used to love being with Yehudi alone. You know, splendid young people can always make me very happy—they seem to give me something to live for. And these two fill my heart with joy, even when I am sad. Cablegrams and long letters from Hephzibah, in Australia, bring her very close to me. And I enjoy her life in wild Victoria, on a ranch with twenty-five thousand sheep, as much as I enjoyed her professional success. Think of the courage and high-heartedness of a girl who could lightly drop a career and cancel her engagements in all the capitals of Europe, to go to Australia and live “a much realer life”, as she writes me. I have not met her husband, but I love him from his letters, and because he is Nola’s brother and Hephzibah’s husband.

  This is a long letter, dear Carrie, but so many things have been happening to me, and I have been out of your life so long, that I want to get back into it again.

  Lovingly to you and Mary

  Willie

  I was so truly disappointed to miss Father [Dennis] Fitzgerald [of Red Cloud]. I was in New Hampshire when he was here. The people at the Knopf office were sorry I missed him—they liked him at first sight. Thank Mary for her letter. I always love to hear from her.

  I shall be leaving for Canada soon.

  TO EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

  October 10 [1939?]

  Dear Edna Millay;

  I’m not fond of writing letters, but may I thank you for the glow of pleasure your last volume [Huntsman, What Quarry?] has given me? Nobody ever sings anymore—and when someone does (someone with a lovely voice) it makes one feel quite young for a moment, even for a whole day, and following days. More than a month ago I first got the book, in Canada, but I have read it many times since. Did you, perhaps, in your childhood have a painted picture-book with a large picture showing red robins dropping russet leaves over the Babes in the Wood? I had such a book. It’s a beautiful allusion—quite melts one’s heart. You wouldn’t have done it twenty years ago. Perhaps you will smile and say that you did write it twenty years ago,—but I should find it hard to believe. Nearly everything in the book is very lovely. Just to hear anybody sing again–––If one has an authentic right to sing, one can gratify the ear as much in “Inert Perfection” as in “Not So Far as the Forest”. Again, thank you.

  Sincerely yours

  Willa Cather

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  October 19, 1939

  Dear F.G.:

  The Swedish books have just come, and I thank you. Also, I want to thank you for the copy of the “College Reader” you sent me.

  Will you be annoyed if I call your attention to some errors in the biographical notice of William Archer? Mr. Archer and I were friends from 1908 until the time of his death. When I went to London every year for McClure’s, and he was my guide and advisor while I was there. He took me to George Meredith’s funeral. We saw the Abbey Theatre Company the first night they ever played in London, sat in [William Butler] Yeats’ box with Lady Gregory. When I came back from a stay in Italy in January 1921, “The Green Goddess” was in full swing in New York. I found a letter from Archer awaiting me at my house, had dinner with him as soon as possible, and he told me the whole story of “The Green Goddess”. He had written me the story of his work on the play, indeed, in 1916 or 1917. The play was written in those years, not in 1920, as this biographer states. He wrote the play to relieve the boredom of his position as censor of the Dublin, Ireland, post office. Archer’s interest was always in plays with a spiritual motive, and a burning purpose. He was one of the first, if not the first English critic to feel the poetry of [John Millington] Synge’s plays when they were produced in London. But he had also been interested in the pure mechanics of the drama, though he had no admiration for carpenter-made plays. He enlivened his routine in Dublin by making a purely mechanical play, where the interest was produced by time honored situations dressed in modern clothes. Play carpentry, he called it. He thought its success was due to the fact that [George] Arliss played it more than to any other reason. He rather liked making so much money, of course.

  The introductory notice speaks casually of his interest in Ibsen. Ibsen was the great enthusiasm of his life. He not only pushed Ibsen’s plays in England, and “edited” them as your biographer says; he was the sole translator of many of the best plays, among them “A Doll’s House”, “Pillars of Society”, “Ghosts”, “An Enemy of Society”. He and Edmund Gosse translated “The Master Builder”. These are the only Ibsen plays I happen to have in my bookcase, but I know that Archer translated still other Ibsen plays. I wonder why your editors chose to use “The Green Goddess” in the “Reader”. But since they did, I think the introductory note should have been more accurate. Of course, the play was first produced in Philadelphia, December 27, 1920, but Archer had written me an outline of it in ’16 or ’17, and it was written in those years.

  I do not suppose you have much to do with the text book section of the publishing house, so perhaps it is foolish in me to trouble you. One does, however, hate to see an old friend presented in such a misleading fashion. The man who first translated and popularized Ibsen in English, did a great service to the English stage. That work was important and formative, and it was the serious work of Archer’s life. “The Green Goddess” was the diversion of a dull year or two.

  Faithfully yours,

  Willa Cather

  [Included is the brief biography of Archer to which Cather refers. She underscored the word “edited” in a sentence about Archer and Ibsen, drew a line from it to the margin, and wrote:] A very different job from translating.

  TO HELEN LOUISE CATHER

  December 20, 1939

  My dear Helen Louise:

  Here is just a little check for a Christmas card. I am sending very modest Christmas cards this year because great misfortunes have happened to some of our friends at Grand Manan. Our carpenter is very ill because he can’t get over the shock of his son’s death. His son just went out in the woods and shot himself after a quarrel with his very gentle old father. A week later, one of our most faithful helpers, Willie Thomas, suffered a great loss. His house burned down at night. He and his brother and his old mother escaped in their night clothes. No insurance—lost everything. One neighbor gave enough timber for a new house, and the Island fishermen volunteered to build it. A half dozen of us pooled together and supplied the money for all the iron fittings, the cement, doors, windows, furniture, bedding, etc., etc. The twins would tell you what a fine old fellow Willie is. He is over sixty years old, and is still one of the best tree hewers on the Island.

  It seems absurd to have both West Virginia and Margaret as near as Boston, and yet never to see them. But I am trying awfully hard to finish a book that has been dragging on for a long while. I quit it altogether when you[r] Uncle Douglass died, and four months later, when I was just picking it up again, Isabelle died in Italy. So this book has h
ad very bad luck. Books are just like people; some have good luck in their making and some have bad.

  I am so glad you can be near the grandparents Garber. I am ordering some carnations for Mrs. Garber’s Christmas. I chose those because she can smell them, even if she can’t see them very well.

  Heaps of love to you, dear, and don’t forget me. We shall see one another again some day, and then it will be as if we had not been separated for so long.

  Your very loving

  Aunt Willie

  PART ELEVEN

  The Culmination of a Career

  1940–1943

  The rush of Virginia memories, when once I began to call them up, was heavy upon me. I wrote many chapters of Virginia ways and manners, just as things came back to me, for the relief of remembering them in a time of loss and personal sorrow. That “eased” me, and comforted.