The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  Then I have another very potent reason for refusing to throw the book overboard, a reason which it is difficult to explain to anyone who does not understand it, and which may sound exceedingly fatuous. I am not the sole proprietor of this book. There are other people who have quite as deep an interest in it as I have myself. Isabelle and Francis Hill are two of them. They have both, as it were, invested capital in the venture. With Isabelle this lot of stories is the fruit of a thousand little personal sacrifices—some of them not so very little, either. To these several people, as to me, your reasons for asking what you ask seem inadequate, arbitrary and visionary in the extreme.

  I very much doubt whether Miss Osbourne would take the matter half so seriously as you do, and I doubt still more that she will ever see it. And I beg to differ with you about the resemblance. The scar is, to me, the only thing the two women have in common. I do not think I am doing anything wrong or brutal in publishing the story. I have never been convinced that I have a definite moral sense myself, but I know that Isabelle has one. I have lived beside it for four years, and I have never ceased to wonder at it. I have never known her to do one thing unkind or ungenerous or ignoble. Her opinion gives me absolute conviction. If I contemplated doing anything base or ugly, she is the one who would detect it first and feel it most keenly. I cant help feeling that on such a question her feeling is trustworthy. I can see that this thing has worried and hurt you, and I think that you have fretted yourself into an exaggerated point of view and then forgotten that there may be such a thing as another opinion quite as sincere as your own.

  For one thing I am heartily sorry, and that is that you should have been annoyed by it, for however mistaken your feeling may be, I know that your position seems the right one to you. It has been disagreeable enough on both sides. The whole thing, coming about as it has, has pretty effectually dampened my ardor and put a very bitter sting into what I have for several years looked forward to as a pleasure. It seems to be paying a very heavy price for a book which in itself contains many keen disappointments. It must be a jar for you, too. Yet I cannot help feeling that my brother was right when I laid the whole question before him summer before last and he said “It will all depend upon where Miss Canfield stands with regard to you.” I am sorry the issue could not have been avoided until after the book was published. It would then have been too late for any discussion and your own course would have shaped itself before you. I shall not send you the lengthy letter that I wrote you when I was ill at Christmas time, as it seems to me that the less there is said on the subject now, the better.

  I hope you will not think me too unreasonable—for surely your request was equally so. I should not ask such a thing of anyone, not even my brother. It seems to me tha[t] when you know how much these stories have meant to me—it’s not a question of what they mean to you or to anyone who will ever read them—when you know how long they have been in coming and under what disadvantages, that your asking me to demolish has its own satiric touch of inconsiderateness. You can scarcely be surprised that I am hurt by it, even though I anticipated your displeasure. I did not, however, in my most misgiving moments, imagine that you would take it in anything like the way or to anything like the extent that you have. The story that I discussed with you in London, by the way, was quite a different story. That was personal.

  I have read this letter over, and it sounds as though I were in a towering rage, the which I am not. But you have put the screws on rather hard and I seem to find it necessary to be savage to stand up against it. I think, of course, that you have considered me very little, and that never really flatters or pleases one. I certainly do know, however, that you must act as you feel. But you must see that I am acting in equally good faith. I dont expect other people to take the stories seriously, or to see why they should not be recalled, but you will certainly admit my right to take them seriously.

  Hastily

  Willa

  By the way, Dorothy, I once sent you a complete list of these stories, and I remember well that I named the Profile, for I asked Isabelle whether she thought you would recognize it. I had no intention of hiding the thing, I only preferred to have it come to your eye with the others. There are at least two more which you have not seen.

  Dorothy Canfield was astonished that Cather would not budge from her position on the story, and neither Cather nor Isabelle McClung (who also wrote Canfield defending the story) could convince her that publication was morally acceptable. Canfield decided to use her connections to pursue the matter directly with Cather’s publisher, McClure, Phillips, and Co. The Canfield contingent apparently persuaded McClure that “The Profile” should not appear in The Troll Garden, for it is not among the stories in that volume. Nevertheless, the story appeared in McClure’s Magazine in June 1907. Writer Viola Roseboro’ was on the staff of McClure’s during the “Profile” conflict.

  TO VIOLA ROSEBORO’

  Sunday [winter 1905]

  My Dear Lady;

  You were the most tactful as well as the most generous of people when you gave us that picture of yourself. It has been a singularly actual comfort in a rather gloomy and disheartening period. As I told you before, it’s to me what country folk call a speaking likeness. And as I’d been feeling eternally disgraced in the eyes of everyone connected with the firm, it brought me to my feet with a start. The whole affair, you see, has been the nearest approach I’ve ever made to a personal disgrace, and the whole row has been so incomprehensible to me,—I seem to have done something so horrid and am so utterly in the dark as to what it is,—that I’ve been seriously questioning as to whether I have any moral sense at all. If Isabelle didn’t feel just as I do, and if I had not such entire confidence not only in her very vigorous sense of right and wrong but in her admirable taste in matters of conduct generally, I should certainly think I must be deficient in the finer kind of moral rectitude. I’m sure that some day the humor of the whole complication will stand out above everything else, but so far I’ve been rather too sore to laugh much.

  I have a week’s vacation the last of March and I am hoping to go to New York then. One gets so terribly in the rut here in the winter, though, that one’s rather timid about venturing out. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a grind long enough to realize what that feeling is, and how stupid and flat and dull it makes people. You get to wanting to stay at home just to hide your own dullness—you’re so afraid you’ll be found out and your shameful nakedness exposed. Isabelle frequently threatens to drug me and put me in a Pullman and ship me off for parts unknown, so that I’ll have to waken up and use my wits. So I may arrive in New York in a semi-conscious state sometime in the last week of March.

  The exceeding heaviness of my mind accounts for my not having written to you before. I’ve been really too dead to address so living a person as yourself. You may remember the shadows who came up and accosted Ulysses in Hades and tried to communicate, but only succeeded in troubling the air with a sigh or two and then drifted back into the myrtle wood. Well, I’m not reclining under the myrtles, and outwardly I’m pretty active, but I feel something of the impotence and timidity of the aforesaid ghosts. I went to hear [pianist Ignacy Jan] Paderewski the other night and I verily felt so much a ghost that I wanted to quit the hall. My silence, you see, has been gracious. It was almost like seeing you myself, to have Isabelle there, and I was particularly glad to have you see her again.

  Faithfully

  Willa S.C.

  When The Troll Garden was published in March 1905, the New York Times Book Review critic effectively summarized the critical response with the comment that the stories in the book “seem to be more the work of promise than of fulfillment.” Nevertheless, it was an important moment in Cather’s career, and the stories in the book—”Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “The Garden Lodge,” “ ‘A Death in the Desert,’ ” “The Marriage of Phaedra,” “A Wagner Matinée,” and “Paul’s Case”—contained themes and settings that f
illed her fiction the rest of her career.

  TO WITTER BYNNER

  June 7, 1905

  My Dear Mr. Bynner;

  In regard to Mr. Slosson’s question as to where I got my information about Western life, you know I lived there for ten years. When I was not quite nine years old [actually, not quite ten], my father moved from the Shenandoah valley to a ranch in the South-western part of Nebraska, about ten miles north of the Kansas line. There was a word in Mrs. [Margaret Wade Campbell] Deland’s letter, you remember, about a “curious lack of a sense of beauty in the tales” which I suspect is true enough. I had never thought of it before, but I suppose one’s early experiences rather cling to one, and the years when I first began to note my surroundings at all were pretty much devoted to discovering ugliness. If you’ve never been about in that part of the West, you simply can’t imagine anything so bleak and desolate as a Nebraska ranch of eighteen or nineteen years ago. In “A Wagner Matinee” I used some of the features that I best remember of the one on which I lived. Up to the time of our going there I had always lived in the most beautiful part of that very beautiful valley, and during the first year that we spent in the West I came about as near dying from homesickness as a healthy child well could. There was one miserable little sluggish stream about eighteen miles from our ranch. It was perhaps ten feet wide in the Spring, and in the late Summer it was no more than a series of black mud holes at the bottom of a ravine, with a few cottonwoods and dwarf elms growing along its banks. I remember that my little brothers and I would do almost anything to get to this creek.

  The country was then almost absolutely treeless. About half way between our ranch and the town where we bought our supplies, or, in the local parlance, “did our trading”, there was a row of Lombard poplars which had been planted for a wind break, and when we children went to town the sight of those poplars was the joy of the occasion. From the moment their tips came into view we began to shout,—and as the town was twenty miles from the ranch, we were generally pretty tired before we got to the trees.

  I shall never forget the first Christmas I spent in the West. Most of our neighbors were Swedes and Norwegians, and my brothers and I were taken to a Christmas entertainment at the Norwegian church. The Christmas tree was a poor little naked box-elder—you probably don’t know that travesty of a tree—all wrapped in green tissue paper, cut in fringes to look like foliage.

  During the four years in which I attended the State University at Lincoln, from 1890 to 1894 [in fact, she graduated in 1895], all that country was burned up by a continuous drouth. Our old neighbors, the Norsemen, began to go insane and to commit suicide in the most heartrending fashion. They were all deeply in debt and heavily mortgaged, and of course the credit of the country went all to pieces during those years. Those who lived through it are men of some means today, and it’s a delight to go back there now and be shown their brussels carpets and bath tubs and shiny oak furniture, and to hear their daughters do runs on parlor organs. Nevertheless, those four years were a rather grim chapter of human history to have lived through. I knew one little Norwegian girl whose sister committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid. The girl herself thought that was wrong, but she was always praying to die. I don’t believe you could imagine how sincerely she wished to die. She was so uniformly sunk in depression that, when they happened to have a half crop one year, her father sent her to Iowa to visit his cousins. She went in a day coach, but when she came back she told my little sister and me that she would never want to die again because she “had found out how beautiful the world was.”

  Things are a good deal better out there now, you understand, but, whenever I go back, I see the old tragedies that I knew so intimately in the background. I suppose the wild soil has to be reclaimed and subdued in that way, and always at pretty much the same cost,—but it must be less grim in countries where the mere external aspect of nature is something gentler.

  I’m apt to be somewhat unrestrained and sentimental upon this subject; that’s why I avoided it when you wrote me before. But this you have brought upon your own head.

  Sincerely

  Willa Sibert Cather

  TO MARIEL GERE

  [Probably September 30, 1905]

  Pittsburgh

  My Dear Mariel;

  Thank you many times over for the long letter you wrote me this summer. You told me just the things I wanted so much to know and yet had not the courage to ask your mother about. I think I missed your father every moment of the time that I spent in Lincoln this summer. He was one of the people whom I had always so wanted Isabelle to meet.

  I had a very happy and very busy two months in the West this summer [accompanied by Isabelle McClung]. In Wyoming we spent a week with Douglass in Cheyenne and a week camping and fishing in the Black Hills with Roscoe. After that we were in Red Cloud four weeks, helping father fix up his new house, which is the pride of his heart. Jessie [Cather Auld] has a dear little house of her own and is as happy as the day is long in making preparations for my small niece or nephew that is to be. We saw a good deal of Mrs. Garber, who is as charming as ever, though greatly aged and saddened. I think she misses the Governor [Silas Garber] sadly, care though he was. Jack and Elsie are big children now, but they keep many of their childish ways and still seem little to me. I think, more than ever, that the West is the only place I want to live, and I am planning to get home to Red Cloud for a year before very long. There are many people there of whom I am very fond.

  After leaving Nebraska I went right on to New York to see Mr. McClure and was there for a week.

  I stayed with Edith Lewis, and had luncheon with Mrs. [Emma Tyndale] Westermann on her fifty-fifth birthday.

  I expect you are, like me, in the thick of your school work again. I am just beginning to get settled in mine. I like it better every year and feel that I do it better. I have such pleasant assistants now; Miss Wilson of Hastings, Neb. and a Wellsley girl.

  Please give my love to your mother and to Ellen and Frances, Mariel, and remember me warmly to Mr. and Mrs. Jones, also to Miss Harris and Mrs. Phillips.

  Faithfully always

  Willa

  Upon publication of The Troll Garden, Witter Bynner sent a copy (along with some of his own poetry) to Henry James, who responded that he found it difficult to read new novels, especially those written by American women, but nevertheless would make an effort for Miss Cather.

  TO WITTER BYNNER

  February 24 [1906]

  Dear Mr. Bynner;

  Thank you for sending me the story, which I think I have been able to improve somewhat. You ask me about the novel—indeed, you asked me about it once before and I neglected to answer your question. The truth is that I had not taken it out of the wrapper in which you sent it back to me, nor even opened it, until some weeks ago when I needed a piece of string and used the one which had been put around it in your office. So you see that I have done absolutely nothing with it. It seems to me not quite bad enough to throw away, and not quite good enough to wrestle with again, therefore it reposes in my old hat box.

  I do think it was most awfully zealous of you to put in a word to Mr. James and definitely call his attention to the book, but I know that you must think his reply worth your pains. It’s such a strikingly personal communication, although it’s about something toward which he declares himself dead. The letter has given me a very keen kind of satisfaction, for the attitude he admits is so exactly that which one would wish him to have. I’ve always known that he must feel just so, but it’s comforting, all the same, to have it from him in black and white. If Mr. James and one or two other men did not feel just as he affirms about our whole amazing scheme of production,––––well, it would really break one’s spirit, you know. It would be a very deep personal hurt. It’s the unshrinking positiveness of his statement as to his estimation of the value of what he terms “promiscuous fiction” that makes Mr. James’ letter a kind of moral stimulant. You shall see with what good grace I can stand up
to whatever punishment he metes out to me in his second letter, to have had the satisfaction of the first. In anticipation of a second letter, however, I certainly do ask your sympathy, even though he should refine upon his treatment in the light of the presupposed youth and innocence of the subject. I feel a good deal as if I were about to undergo a searching physical examination from which I should come away with my former unsuspecting confidence in the ordinary reputableness and dependableness of my organs forever shaken. Or, worse still, with my doubts horribly confirmed. The prospect of his doing what he calls “his best” by me,–––well, wouldn’t you, now, were you actually facing the prospect of such an attention, have to whistle to keep up your courage?

  So I’ll ask your sympathy and beg you, when you get his diagnosis, to let me have it faithfully and soon.

  Faithfully

  Willa Sibert Cather

  Henry James never made any further comment on the stories.

  In the spring of 1906 Cather’s decade in Pittsburgh came to an end. Anticipating a major shake‑up in his staff, S. S. McClure came to Pittsburgh and asked Cather to join McClure’s Magazine in New York. In May 1906 she began her work at one of the most influential editorial offices in the country.

  The following letter was printed in Wah Hoo, the Allegheny High School newspaper.

  TO HER HOMEROOM CLASS

  at Allegheny High School, Pittsburgh

  June 6, 1906

  Dear Boys and Girls;

  Now that I find that I shall not return to the High School next fall, I have a word to say to you. A number of my pupils in various classes, and especially in my Reporting Class, asked me, when I came away, whether I should be with you next year. At that time I fully expected to be. The changes in my plans which will prevent my doing so have been sudden and unforeseen. I should hate to have you think that I had not answered you squarely when you were good enough to ask whether I should return, or to have you think that I put you off with an excuse.