by Willa Cather
As the letters in this collection reflect, Cather was sustained throughout this extraordinary life by many deep and long-lasting relationships. She was close with certain members of her family, especially her parents, her brothers Douglass and Roscoe, and several nieces and nephews. She maintained friendships from her early years in Red Cloud, Lincoln, and Pittsburgh for many years and also enjoyed new friendships. Though some of the people she befriended were fellow luminaries, like Robert Frost, Sarah Orne Jewett, Yehudi Menuhin, S. S. McClure, and Alfred Knopf, she seemed to get the deepest satisfaction out of old friends with whom she shared a long history. Unfortunately, the two relationships that were likely the most profound in her adult life—Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Edith Lewis—are not well represented in her correspondence. Only a small handful of letters from Cather to these two women are known to survive.
THOUGH THE MISSING LETTERS to Lewis and McClung Hambourg are a disappointing gap in the record, we are incredibly lucky in the range and richness of Cather letters that did survive. Thanks to the stewardship of dozens of archives around the world (please see note about archives, this page) thousands of letters written by Willa Cather are now available to us. The attitudes, emotions, and voice of Cather’s letters are as diverse as one would expect from any human being over the course of sixty years. Yet in another way, there is a consistency of personality throughout all of them, a tang of Cather’s character that one can sense in all of her prose. It is difficult and perhaps fruitless to try to define this quality, but one might call it frankness or self-possession. Cather is always vitally herself, even when she confesses anxious self-consciousness, and in spite of her habit of writing falsehoods about trivial matters. Her voice in her letters, as in her fiction, emerges from an emotional and intellectual commitment to what it is she has to say. Her writing is not pretentious and does not seem, as Cather said about the work of another writer, “as if she were packing a trunk for someone else, and trying conscientiously to put everything in.”10 Instead, when reading Cather’s letters one can feel the force of a vibrant, individual personality deeply interested in things.
First page of November 6, 1938, letter from Willa Cather to her brother Roscoe (photo credit itr.1)
Cather herself identified this ability to be interested as the source of her strength as a writer. In a 1938 letter to her brother Roscoe, she wrote, “As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer.”11 What she called in the same letter “the heat under the simple words” is present throughout her correspondence, from the funny reports of Red Cloud life she wrote when she was a teenager in the 1880s to the painful letters of the 1940s when she despaired at her own worn-down body and the heartbreaking destruction of a world at war.
The voice of Cather’s correspondence is in many ways strikingly consistent with the voice of her fiction: it is confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, and concerned with profound ideas without relying on heavily philosophical language. In other ways, the style of her voice in the correspondence is significantly different than the polished voice of her fiction: one senses that the letters are Cather’s voice without the refinement of the revision process. The letters sometimes reveal Cather as a rather histrionic character. Her correspondents get regular tirades about poor health, challenges of work and housekeeping, and exhaustion. She can be, in modern parlance, a drama queen. This results in claims that are not measured or deliberate, but instead made for dramatic rhetorical effect. For example, in a 1916 letter to her brother Douglass, she discusses some conflict she had with him and the rest of her family and huffs, “I think I’ve had my belting, and it has taken the fizz out of me all right—and I’ll tell you this, it’s positively shipwreck for work. I doubt whether I’ll ever write anything worth while again. To write well you have to be all wrapped up in your game and think it awfully worth while. I only hope I’m not so spiritless I won’t be able to make a living.”12 But Cather’s hyperbole, though it can be misleading—another letter written on the same day to a different brother reveals excitement about an idea for a new novel—is not exactly dishonest. Rather, it is consistent with her straightforward emotional experience of the world.
“I am sure you realize,” she wrote Carrie Miner Sherwood in 1945, “that things have always hit me very hard. I suppose that is why I never run out of material to write about. The inside of me is so full of dents and scars, where pleasant and unpleasant things have hit me in the past.… Faces, situations, things people said long ago simply come up from my mind as if they were written down there. They would not be there if they hadn’t hit me hard.”13 She felt things keenly, and her letters are one of the chief records she left of that feeling. In some respects, that is what makes Cather’s letters such a pleasure to read. She is wrapped up in whatever emotion she wished to communicate: when she is angry, she lets fly with specific, strongly worded scoldings that almost make one wince; when she is ill, one practically feels the pain and lethargy with her; and when she is excited, when she is consumed with the pleasure of creative work, or when she wants to let someone know that she cares deeply for them, the glow of that emotion is felt, even across all these years. That is, in the end, why Cather’s letters should be published. She was a great writer, and these words of hers deserve readers.
* * *
1See the full letter from Virginia Cather Brockway to Meta Schaper Cather on this page.
2Elizabeth Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 275.
3See this page.
4Willa Cather, will dated April 29, 1943, Paragraph Seventh.
5Norman Holmes Pearson, “The Problem of Literary Executorship,” Studies in Bibliography 5 (1952–53), 8.
6See this page.
7See this page.
8“Willa Cather Talks of Work,” in Willa Cather in Person, ed. L. Brent Bohlke (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 10.
9Willa Cather, “My First Novels (There Were Two),” in Willa Cather on Writing (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 93.
10See this page.
11See this page.
12See this page.
13See this page.
Note on Editorial Procedures
IN THIS VOLUME, a generous selection of the correspondence of one of America’s foremost writers is made available for the first time. In selecting letters for inclusion we have given preference to those that particularly relate to the creation of Willa Cather’s fiction, her career in journalism, her perspectives on issues of the day, and her relationships with key people in her life. A few seemingly trivial letters are included in order to give a sense of how she handled routine business or social obligations, her sense of humor, and her enjoyment of daily life. We hope that together these chosen letters present the complex humanity of Willa Cather.
The organization of the volume is strictly chronological. Reading through these selected letters in order provides a kind of autobiography: Cather’s own words sketching the episodes that constituted her life.
All of the letters are presented in their entirety. We have made the utmost effort to present the original letters with meticulously accurate transcriptions while also providing a reading experience that is unencumbered by superficial errors. Our procedures in attempting to accomplish this goal have been as follows:
1. We have retained the spelling in the original letters, even when it was in error. These misspellings are most frequent in Cather’s early letters, and keeping them allows the reader to sense the vital messiness of those youthful writings. However, in other letters, particularly in typewritten correspondence, there are frequent minor errors that are not necessarily reflective of a style or of weak spelling skills, but are mere typographical mistakes. These obvious errors (like “graoned” for “groaned”) have been silently corrected. If we have inserted whole missing words—or parts of words—because we believe they were intended, we have used brackets to indicate our insertions. In choo
sing which passages could be silently corrected and which ought to be left alone, we had to use our editorial judgment, and we were guided throughout by the goal of providing accurate transcriptions without the clutter of trivial errors.
2. When Cather has made revisions (additions, deletions, etc.) in the text of a letter, we have presented the text as Cather revised it. Cather’s deleted words are not present in our transcriptions.
3. In many handwritten letters, Cather’s punctuation is more than a little ambiguous. To resolve such ambiguities, we have relied on punctuation patterns that are discernible throughout the letters and have assumed Cather was being consistent rather than inconsistent. For example, when a title in double quotation marks is at the end of a sentence, Cather usually put the period outside of the quotation marks, like this: “Title”. In many of her handwritten letters, however, it is difficult to determine whether the double quotation mark or the period is further to the right, and we have decided to follow the pattern as illustrated above. We have not altered Cather’s punctuation when, for example, her use of commas challenges our sense of stylistic propriety. We assume her frequent insertions of “unnecessary” commas is a stylistic choice, and we have honored it. In cases where the distinction between a comma and a period is ambiguous, we have chosen the punctuation that makes the most sense to us within the context.
4. In some typewritten letters, Cather (or her secretary Sarah Bloom) has rendered the titles of books in all capital letters. We have altered the all-capital titles to underscored titles. Words that remain in all capitals in our transcriptions are words that seem to have been capitalized for emphasis, or, in some cases, to make the spelling of a difficult or foreign word plain to her reader.
5. Whenever Cather underlined text in a letter, we have rendered that as underscored text in the transcription. Very rarely Cather used multiple lines under a word or phrase, but we have rendered all underlines with just one line.
6. Cather often used extended or multiple dashes in her correspondence, and we have represented them as close to the original as possible, for example using “–––” to indicate when Cather wrote three dashes in the original document. When we have used only the standard em-dash (—), it indicates that, in the original, Cather used a single dash or, in the case of typewritten letters, two hyphens to indicate a single dash.
7. Occasionally, Cather inserted something into the text of a letter above the main line or in the margin that did not fit grammatically into the sentence she was composing, a sort of note on the main sentence. We have represented these insertions in parentheses. Parentheses in this text, however, do not exclusively indicate such notes. When Cather used parentheses in her letters, these too are represented with parentheses in this book.
8. Rarely, we have followed a word in the text with a bracketed question mark: [?]. This indicates that we have real doubt about the word or words transcribed in that particular spot.
Throughout, readers will notice insertions of dates, names, and other bits of information in square brackets. Dates and words in square brackets were not written by Cather in the original letters but were supplied by us in an effort to provide helpful identifications and explanations that are integrated into the text as seamlessly as possible, without unduly cluttering the reading experience. For recurring names in the book, readers may wish to consult the biographical directory at the back, as it provides thumbnail sketches of most of the important people whose names fill Cather’s correspondence.
Acknowledgments
A BOOK LIKE THIS ONE is the result of cooperative work on the part of many people and institutions, and we have many to thank and acknowledge.
We first must thank the Willa Cather Trust, the entity that controls the intellectual property rights to Cather’s work, for allowing this selection from her letters to be published at last. The Willa Cather Trust is a partnership between the Willa Cather Foundation, the University of Nebraska Foundation, and a member of the Cather family. The Willa Cather Foundation and the University of Nebraska have long been committed to the study and appreciation of the work and life of Willa Cather; for those of us within the Cather scholarly community, there is an incredibly deep appreciation for the breakthrough made possible by their giving permission for publication of letters. For more information about the Willa Cather Trust, please see http://www.willacather.org/permissions.
We would also like to thank the Willa Cather Foundation, its staff, and its board of governors, for the support given to this project and to Cather scholarship generally. The foundation’s work during its nearly sixty years of existence has resulted in a greater understanding and appreciation for Cather through educational outreach such as international seminars, conferences, and other events, and publications such as the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review. Through its stewardship, the foundation has also preserved many historical properties in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Thus, the foundation is responsible for the persistence of something of the world Cather knew in the crucial years of her youth. For readers moved by Cather’s work, a trip to Red Cloud is a profound and delightful experience.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln has supported this project in very explicit and meaningful ways. As the steward of the world’s largest and richest collection of original Cather materials and the home of the Cather Project, Cather Studies, The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, and the online Willa Cather Archive, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is a primary presence behind virtually all Cather scholarship. More specifically, UNL, as Andrew Jewell’s employer, has supported his Cather scholarship in numerous ways, particularly by granting him a faculty development leave in order to complete the manuscript for this book. Jewell would especially like to thank the administration of the University Libraries and the staff of Archives and Special Collections for its support. Thank you to Mary Ellen Ducey, Peterson Brink, Josh Caster, Traci Robison, Maggie Van Diest, Joanie Barnes, Nancy Busch, and Joan Giesecke. Special thanks goes to Katherine Walter, a simply wonderful department chair, who has been a steadfast supporter of Cather scholarship and who has done more than anyone else to make Jewell’s career at UNL a pleasure and an honor.
The Cather scholarly community is known for its collegiality, and we would like to thank several scholars who have brought information to our attention, provided us with materials, or otherwise demonstrated support. Though so many have helped in small ways (the applause and encouragement we received when we announced the project at the 2011 International Cather Seminar in Northampton, Massachusetts, should not be underestimated), we would like to single out several colleagues in this community who have assisted in larger and more specific ways, especially Melissa Homestead, Robert Thacker, and Richard Harris for providing key materials; Timothy Bintrim and Matthew Rubery for bringing individual letters to our attention; Mark Madigan for assisting with a tricky transcription; and Kari Ronning, Ann Romines, and Guy Reynolds for their continual intellectual and personal support. Jewell also thanks Tom Gallagher, a Cather Foundation board member, for his great help and camaraderie while poring over the Cather-Knopf correspondence in New York.
Janis Stout adds her voice to all of these expressions of gratitude and wishes to mention, in addition, Nancy Chinn (a Cather colleague now deceased who always cheered on Stout’s Cather studies) and John McDermott (not a Cather colleague, but a colleague nevertheless, who first urged the preparation of a calendar of letters).
The Cather family, with their continued generosity and enthusiasm, has been crucial both in making letters available to readers and in allowing them to be published. We would especially like to thank Jim and Angela Southwick, Trish and Jim Schreiber, Katie Shannon, Ann W. Shannon, Elizabeth A. Shannon, Margaret Lundock, John Cather Ickis, Margaret Ickis Fernbacher, Dr. Mary Weddle, and George Brockway.
Several students and former students have given important assistance in various stages of preparation of this book. Thanks to Paul Callahan (who is responsible for the translations of Cather’s French), Rosann
a Dell, Molly McBride Lasco, Amanda Kuhnel Madigan, Carmen McCue, and Jeremy Wurst (who is responsible for the translation of Cather’s Latin joke). Special thanks goes to Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant, who served as editorial assistant on A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition and who has given much diligent, intelligent energy to working with us on Cather’s letters in various ways.
The archivists and staff at the many institutions that hold letters deserve repeated thanks, and we would again like to acknowledge their work. Throughout our long work with multiple and varied organizations, we were impressed again and again with the professionalism and generosity of those who make research materials both safe and available. Please see our note on archives for a complete listing of institutions whose materials are represented in this volume.
At Knopf, we have been very fortunate to work with Ann Close, a terrific editor and a supporter of this project from the moment she heard about it, and we thank her and other staff members at Knopf for their fine work. Cather’s admiration for the skill and quality of Knopf publishers is something we now understand on a personal level.
Personally, Jewell would like to thank and acknowledge his parents, Steve and Cheryl Jewell, for their steady love and encouragement throughout his whole life, an anchor that has made everything he has done possible. And, most profoundly, Jewell wishes to thank his wife and daughters, Becca, Emma, and Jane Jewell. All three celebrated the opportunity to make this book, even if it meant constant dinner chatter about Willa Cather, endless anecdotes from the letters shared on the ride to school, and giving up a great art area so Dad could have somewhere to work every day. Becca, thank you for saying, many times, and in many ways, that this book was worth it. As Willa Cather would say, a heartful of love to you all.