by Willa Cather
Mrs. [Flavia] Canfield and Dorothy came to see me at Christmas time and I had to introduce Mrs. C to a lot of club magnates. Fancy her coming to me for that. O it does my wickid un-Christian heart good to get even, to pay off the old scores and make people take back the bitter things they said in those years when bitter things hurt so. But you must not take this too seriously, I’m not really such a cross sour old thing. I suspect the trouble tonight is loss of sleep. First it was [Nellie] Melba in opera, next night a supper party given by Mrs. [Lizzie Hudson] Collier to Mr. and Mrs. Crane [actor William H. Crane and his wife Ella Chloe Myers], next night a dinner to Ethelbert Nevin the composer, and tonight I was out to dinner with a crowd at the Bishop’s.
I have met some very interesting people this year. Got to know Anthony Hope Hawkins quite well, he was here several days and one of my friends here knew him at Oxford. [F.] Marion Crawford is a detestable snob. [Fridtjof] Nansen is all the Norse gods and heros in one, though he would talk nothing but [Robert] Browning and [Henrik] Ibsen. Ethelbert Nevin is prince and king of them all. He went shopping with me this afternoon and carried my bundles and got me a bunch of violets as big as a young moon. Think of it, the greatest of American composers and a fellow of thirty with the face of a boy and the laugh of a girl. You know his “Thine eyes are stars of morning” and “O that we two were maying” “Narcissus” & “Little Boy Blue”.
I will do better than this when I’m not so sleepy. My love to you all
Willa
The scene Cather briefly describes above—shopping in the winter with composer Ethelbert Nevin—was likely remembered years later when, in her 1925 story “Uncle Valentine,” she includes a brief description of Valentine Ramsay “hurrying about the shops” at Christmastime and buying his companion a gift of flowers.
In the spring and summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War was dominating the headlines—headlines Willa Cather was writing as part of her job in Pittsburgh.
TO FRANCES GERE
June 23, 1898
[Written in at the top, upside down:] So Fritz Westermann has gone to war, nothing so good ever happened! Perhaps that is what the war is for!
My Dearest Frances;
It was awfully nice of you to remember me with a commencement invitation and it was a great disappointment to me not to be able to see you graduate. I had always counted on being present at that festal time and seeing you dressed for the Senior Prom. and all the rest of it. But the horrors of war seem to be a good deal worse in newspaper offices than in the field and I had to stay on here grilling in the heat and writing headlines about Cervera [Spanish admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete] being bottled up in Santiago harbor. I expect to start west for a two month’s vacation the first of August, however, and then I will see you and hear all about the commencement festivities.
Dorothy [Canfield] will be with me for a few days week after next. Her mother has been having serious trouble with her eyes—threatened with cataracts and a total loss of sight. I believe she don’t want Lincoln people to know it though. Dorothy is now in Vermont, where her grandfather died a few weeks ago. Poor child, she has been having a rocky summer of it.
I hear that all the old maids in Lincoln have been marrying off in cohorts, cant you find a widower or something for me when I am there this summer? Do try to manage it.
I spent the first two weeks of May in Washington with my cousin Dr. [Howard] Gore, a Prof. in the Columbian University, who was sent by the government with the Wellman polar expedition. He was giving farewell dinners to all his friends and going out a great deal and we had a gay time. I met no end of interesting people. The new Turkish charge d’affairs took me out to dinner one night and I have a score of funny things to tell you about him. Then we had the Norwegians ambassador out to dinner, and the secretary of the German legation, Count Alexander Finch von Finckenstein, and Herr Otto Schenfeldt, who was the tutor of Signor de Louie’s sons and who is so pro-Spanish that his mail is under government survillience. My cousin married Lillian Thekla Brandthall, a famous Christiana belle and daughter of a former ambassador from Norway to America. O my child but she is glorious! l’etoile du Nord and no mistake. She is one of the hundred and one cousins of King Oscar of Sweden, and can relate no end of interesting court experiences. It is all arranged that I am to go back to Norway with her some day—perhaps I may go to the Paris Exposition with them. But I must save all those charming Washington adventures to tell you by word of mouth. Howard will write me from Siberia before he takes the final plunge into the Polar sea, which we all shudder to contemplate. If I had so lovely a wife as his, and one who could sing Grieg’s songs as she can and read Ibsen like the very Tragic Muse herself, I would not go hunting the North Pole. But one is never satisfied it seems, when a man has the front of his coat covered with decorations from the various majesties and Royal Socities of the Continent, and has wedded a very Brunhilda, then forsooth, he must want the Pole, having nothing else left to wish for.
Goodness how glad I will be to see you all again this summer! I can’t seem to like any other place on earth so well. There is nothing I fear so much as that I may gradually drift out of your lives until I will be—O well, just like any other stranger. You won’t let that happen, my dear, will you? I think nothing in life could quite make up that loss to me. With a heart full of love for all of you
Willa
During a long vacation in the summer of 1898 Cather traveled to Nebraska and, with her brother Roscoe, went on an extended hunting trip into the Black Hills of South Dakota and in Wyoming. While in Red Cloud, she worked in a family friend’s office on a projected book made up of open letters to famous actors and actress, to be called The Player Letters. It was never published, but some of the individual letters did appear as articles in the Lincoln Courier.
Sometime in 1899, Cather developed a close friendship with a woman who was to become one of the great loves of her life: Isabelle McClung, a member of a prominent Pittsburgh family. The two met backstage in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD
October 10, 1899
Murray Hill, Pittsburgh
My Very Dearest Kid;
Here I am chez the Goddess and studying Greek to beat the band. Have’nt seen the Nevins yet, but they telephoned me a rousing welcome home and Ethelbert sent me a note and a copy of Shakespeares sonnets this afternoon. Say, do you know it isn’t half bad to be back. I had a good trip and spent a most delightful day with the Peatties in Chicago and dined with “Misther Dooley” [Finley Peter Dunne], the irresistable Dan. Mrs. Peattie has at last arrived, so to speak, for her story “The Man at the Edge of Things” in the September Atlantic is literature, as good as most modern French things and as elusive and artistic. She wants me to go to Chicago in the spring, and I think I shall. Dooley says there is no woman doing newspaper work there now that I need be afraid of. I guess he and the Peatties will make the venture safe.
When I arrived at the union station here, on the very train on which you used to arrive, Isabelle met me, looking as though all the frieze of the Parthenon ought to be tripping after her, and I began to have a better opinion of Pittsburgh. She’s so darned good to me that she’s making me positively kiddish. She’ll have me playing with dolls next. We’ve been tramping over the hills and hearing the [Walter] Damrosch orchestra every day and having no end of a frivolous good time.
I know pretty well how you are located, but small thanks to you, my Lady. I read all Mariel’s letters home and know all about your fellow voyagers, the red bear[d]ed artist and the dwarf and the woman with the marquise rings, and saw her diagram of your flat in Paris, though I suppose only a Nebraskan like myself would speak of a flat in Paris. But that all seems second hand, I want to know how things seem to you, won’t you please write me exhaustively? As soon as I get located in my new den I’ll write you young novels, I will.
Isabelle and I went down to see the Willards [Elise May and Marie Willard] last night and had a
hilarious time. It was quite a reunion, Miss May from California, Miss Brooks from Europe and W. C. from Red Cloud!
When my train stopped at Columbus I had the queerest lonesome feelings all over me. Bridge the distance in some way, and do it quickly. What are you studying, with whom is your mother painting, I want to know everything. I’ll keep up my end if you will yours.
Good night my dearest, I’ll send my next letter by express.
Yours always
Willa
P.S. I of course know all about your father’s great big hit in Bishop Potter’s church and advertised it the whole length of Nebraska. Hurrah for him, which means, eventually, three cheers for you. O these haughty, prosperous, getting there Canfields.
Isabelle sends everything in the shape of regards and Alfred [McClung]—O but I’ll tell you about him next time!
Though Cather’s social life in the fall of 1899 was obviously full, she was also quite active in her writing. She apparently met Leonard Charles Van Noppen, a poet and lecturer on Dutch literature born in the Netherlands, through her work at the Pittsburg Leader. Edwin P. Couse, mentioned at the end of the following letter, was her boss there.
TO LEONARD CHARLES VAN NOPPEN
January 26, 1900
Pittsburg Leader, Pittsburgh
My Dear Mr. Van Noppen;
I have delayed welcoming you back so long that now I am almost ashamed to do it, but I’ll take the chance and congratulate you on your successful year.
First in answer to your question about a Dutch lecture in Pittsburgh. Surely you lived here long enough to know that the people have no interest in English literature, much less Dutch. [Israel] Zangwill can’t draw a beggars dozen here, and I would’nt let my cousin Dr. Gore of Washington, try it.
No, [Arthur] Stedman did nothing with the manuscripts [of The Player Letters] except get them dirty and cause me a considerable loss of time. I have not placed them yet. An illustrated article of mine [“The Man Who Wrote ‘Narcissus,’ ” about Ethelbert Nevin] appears in the May Ladies Home Journal, a story will be out in the New England Magazine sometime this winter [“El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional”], I shall have some verses in the Feb. or March Critic [“Grandmither, Think Not I Forget”], a poem in the Criterion soon, one in McClures and several in smaller publications. So you see I have not been altogether idle. The Player Letters are now with R. H. Russell & Co., of New York. Do you happen to know any of his people? If you do I’d be mightily obliged if you could speak a word for them and ask him what he thinks of them. Rupert Hughes, of the Criterion says they will surely go somewhere.
Let me know how the translations come on, and especially how you come on yourself.
Mr. Couse and all the boys join me in best wishes.
Faithfully your Friend
Willa Cather
In 1900 Cather left her position at the Pittsburg Leader and went to Washington, D.C., to work with her cousin James Howard Gore, a mathematics professor at Columbian University (now The George Washington University), as part of the United States Commission to the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Willa Cather during the years she was a teacher in Pittsburgh (photo credit 2.2)
TO PRESTON COOKE FARRAR
February 4, 1901
Columbian University, Washington, D. C.
My dear Mr. Farrar:
Before I close any newspaper contracts in Pittsburgh, of which I have several pending, I want to ask your advice about a long cherished plan of mine. When I first graduated from the Nebraska State, I was not twenty, and had a record of insubordination in [Lucius A.] Sherman’s classes behind me. What I wanted to do then was to begin to teach English or English literature at some other school, but I was patently too young and too undignified, so I took the nearest substitute that came to hand. Since I have been here in Washington my headquarters have been in a university, and the atmosphere has appealed to me very strongly, and made the disagreeable features of a newspaper office seem more disagreeable than ever. It seems to me to be a good time to begin to think about making the change which I have always intended to make, and my family are very anxious for me to do so. My professorial friends down here have given me warm encouragement. It may be that I can get pretty much what I want here, but for personal reasons I would a little rather be in Pittsburgh next year. I want to ask you whether you think there would be any chance for me in any of the high schools there, or if you are not much in touch with the schools now, what would be my best method of procedure to find out? I am aware of course that I should have to force my dignity by a hot house process, but I am getting to be an astonishingly serious sort of person now, so I think I am ready to take up a more staid pace.
Dorothy has written me vague and tantalizing hints of all sorts of glorious prospects for you in New York, until I confess I am consumed with curiosity, and would be grateful for more definite information.
Isabel[le] is at the hospital, and is mighty sick of it, but I think it will do the young person a world of good.
Please let me hear from you about your own affairs as well as mine.
Very faithfully,
Willa Cather
On February 17, 1901, the composer Ethelbert Nevin died suddenly of a stroke at age thirty-eight. The following letter is to his widow.
TO ANNE PAUL NEVIN
237 R. Street N. E.
Washington
Saturday [February 23, 1901]
My Dear, Dear Mrs. Nevin:
I have begun so many letters to you this week, but the writing of them has been impossible as their message was unspeakable. I do not feel like one at a distance expressing sympathy, but as one near at hand expressing sorrow, for in an infinitely less degree I suffer of the same hurt. A shadow has come over the sun and nothing seems worth the doing. Mr. Nevin had a genius for being beloved, and for taking hold upon the minds and hearts of people. I am sure I never wished any other human being so well, nor wanted the noblest success so much for anyone. I know that I shall never feel that youthful and genuine enthusiasm for any one or for any one’s work again, and I feel as though my own youth had died with the man who, even when I did not know him, meant so very much to it. His personality was to me the very exponent of song, the embodiment of all the happy privileges of art—and all of its tragic sadness. It used to seem to me as though he were quite simply a shepherd lad strayed out of Arcady into this dreary land of dullness and uniformity and shop-keeper standards. And yet there was such a tragic vein in him, and some of the stuff of martyrdom. He used sometimes to seem like a man stripped of his skin, with every nerve quivering to the torture of the air, like that other unhappy singer Marsayas, whom jealous Apollo flayed.
Isabelle wrote me of his last silent home coming. Had I known there was a possibility of seeing his face again I should have gone on from Washington. I want to remember him always, always, just as he was. I am sure you must have arranged the services yourself, for they were so eminently fitting, but I dont think I could have stood it to hear his songs when he was in so deep a sleep. I am not one of those who learn easily to kiss the cross.
The last time I saw him he said he was going away “where people could not say unkind things any more.” Oh I hope those people will suffer and suffer and suffer! And they will, I know it. Heaven calls the world to account for souls like his. I think you and his mother are perhaps the only two who could have nothing to regret. If ever any one had and fulfilled a commission from God you have done it, for you saved him and the wonder of him for us all as long as you could, otherwise he would have lashed himself out long ago. I do believe with all my heart and mind that your service was not only unto him but unto all men, and that he will be one of those whose tapers burn throughout the night of time.
Dear Lady, for the last week tears and I have not been strangers, but at the bottom of my grief lies the thought of the sweetness of his sleep, of the utterness of his peace. Oh lady, life is not so gay that one need dread to sleep! I have learned that already. Le sens de la vie,
est ce qui est difficile pour nous autres. Le sens de la morte est facile——on la comprend comme la chanson d’une mère. [“The meaning of life is what is difficult for the rest of us. The meaning of death is easy——we understand it like a mother’s lullaby.”] When I think of him, and that is so many times in the day and the night, I think also of the blessed truth of the lines that Shelly wrote to Keats after the world had killed him, and that were afterward put on the Shelley tablet at Oxford.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not, nor trouble him again.
I will return to Pittsburgh next week and then I hope you can see me. Surely you know without my saying it that if in collecting his papers or in preparing any biographical matter I can be of any service to you, it will be my happiness and pride to serve you to the very utmost capacity of my ability and my love. There are many nearer friends and longer-tried near you to sympathize with you, but I don’t think there is one whose love or whose sorrow is more sincere. A master of any art holds a peculiar place in the lives of his believers. To them he is the expression of what seems most rare and precious in life, and when he dies something of themselves goes out with him. I think my sense of heaviness and loss will be less if in any way I can serve you a little. All the love of my sad heart goes to you with this letter. With a loyalty that shall last as long as I live, Dear Lady.
Willa.
The lines of poetry and the phrase “whose tapers burn throughout the night of time” are from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for poet John Keats published in 1821 shortly after his death (except the last line should read “Can touch him not and torture not again”). Later, Cather would write poems inspired by Nevin’s death titled “Lament for Marsyas” and “Arcadian Winter,” employing some of the same metaphors she uses in this letter. Much later, Cather would draw on Nevin for her character Valentine Ramsay in her 1925 short story “Uncle Valentine.”