by Willa Cather
I had made many plans for your Senior work next year and had hoped that we should enjoy that work together. I must now leave you to enjoy it alone. One always has to choose between good things it seems. So I turn to a work I love with very real regret that I must leave behind, for the time at least, a work I had come to love almost as well. But I much more regret having to take leave of so many students whom I feel are good friends of mine. As long as I stay in New York, I shall always be glad to see any of my students when they come to the city.
I wish you every success in your coming examinations and in your senior work next year.
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
PART THREE
The McClure’s Years
1906–1912
Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right. If I have been going forward at all in the last five years, [it] has been progress of the head and not of the hand. At thirty-four one ought to have some sureness in their pen point and some facility in turning out a story.
—WILLA CATHER TO SARAH ORNE JEWETT, December 19, 1908
Willa Cather, about 1910 (photo credit 3.1)
CATHER’S EXPERIENCE IN JOURNALISM and magazine publication stood her in good stead when, in 1906, she left teaching and joined the staff of McClure’s Magazine. At that time, no other magazine was as successful and respected as McClure’s. The magazine created sensations with its investigative reporting on corporations and municipalities and also published fiction by some of the best-known writers in English, including Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. S. S. McClure himself was celebrated as a kind of genius of journalism, but he was also notoriously erratic and difficult to work for. He hired Willa Cather, in fact, because he had just lost the bulk of his staff after an office uprising, including well-known writers like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Cather began as a fiction editor but within months was given the onerous writing assignment of pulling together into publishable form a set of research notes about Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. She spent much of 1907 and 1908 in Boston rechecking and extending the research. The results first appeared as a series of articles in McClure’s (published under the name of the original researcher, Georgine Milmine) and then as a book, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1909), still showing authorship by Milmine. Although seven stories and a number of poems written by Cather would appear in McClure’s between 1906 and 1916, her main energies during the six years she actually worked for the magazine (much of that time as managing editor) went into editorial work—to the point that she became convinced it was draining her creative energy.
When Cather moved to New York in 1906, she took an apartment at 60 Washington Square South, in the same building as her friend Edith Lewis. The apartment was in the heart of Greenwich Village, right next door to the “House of Genius” at 61 Washington Square South, where over the years rooms had been rented by various artists and writers, including Stephen Crane and Frank Norris.
The following letter to a McClure’s contributor provides a glimpse into Cather’s editorial work in her early days at the magazine.
TO HARRISON G. DWIGHT
October 9, 1906
New York City
Dear Mr. Dwight:
We took “The Valley of the Mills” because we liked it in spite of the fact that we felt it lacked something; at least Mr. McClure and I both liked it very, very much. I always hold out in argument that a feeling can be a story just as much as an incident, or rather that a story can be made out of a feeling as naturally as it can be made out of an incident.
Still, I do think there are certain ways of arrangement which are as necessary in the management of a story made out of a feeling as they are in the management of a story made out of an incident, but this is futile talk, because you know the weak side of your own work better than anyone else knows it. It really seems such a trivial weakness that I cannot believe you will find it very hard to get over.
If you are going back to hallowed and wholesome lands, I feel that you ought to be able to find stories there for us. As long as I am here your work shall always have an ardent advocate. There is nobody here who would not like the “outlandishness” and picturesqueness, provided that you can make the story run a little hotter and swifter through your atmosphere.
I want to see you before you go away because I have long been thinking about the possibility of a series of descriptive articles which would have to do with Mediterranean countries and I want to talk this matter over with you. I am going to Pittsburg on Friday night of this week to be gone until the first of November. After I return I shall be at #60 South Washington Square. Please telephone or drop me a note before you come so that I may be sure to be at home.
In case you are going away before I come back, I hope you will try to drop into the office some day this week. I shall be there every day until Saturday.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Sibert Cather
You do so nearly press the button in the story we took. Of course we all think it’s world’s better than plenty of stories that “get there” admirably—but if this story arrived with both its feet it would be a really valuable thing—a stem winder!
TO CHARLES F. CATHER
Monday [December 17, 1906]
My Dear Father;
I feel so badly about not getting home to spend Christmas with my sick daddy. Until today I have thought that I might be able to make it, and I have shed a good many bitter tears over giving it up. For eight years it has been my dream to have a Christmas at home, and this year I thought I would make it. But if you were here, my father, you’d tell me to stand by my job and not to desert Mr. McClure in this crisis. It would mean such a serious loss to him in money and influence not to have the March article come out—Everyone would think he was beaten and scared out, for the articles are under such a glare of publicity and such a fire of criticism. I had nothing to do with the January article [on Mary Baker Eddy] remember, my work begins to appear in February. Mr. McClure is ill from worry and anxiety, and though he wants to let me go home and knows how homesick I am, he begs me to stay here until after Xmas.
I am working night and day to buy my freedom and get to you, father, and it helps me to think that in staying I’m doing just what you would do in my place and what you always taught me to do. I feel like a poor excuse of a daughter to be away from you when you are so ill, but my heart is with you and mother now, and the rest of me will be there before New Year’s day.
Lovingly
Willie
Ida Tarbell, a famous “muckraking” writer of McClure’s, left the magazine with many others in 1906 to run the American Magazine. Tarbell’s series of articles The Tariff in Our Times began there in the December 1906 issue.
TO IDA TARBELL
Friday [probably January 4 or 11, 1907]
New York City
Dear Miss Tarbell;
Being house-bound with a cold I have been compelled to take a short vacation from Xtian Science. In this breathing space I have turned to the Tariff for consolation, and, almost against my will, have found it. I hadn’t the least notion that a frivolous person like myself could find it interesting, but I read it with growing enthusiasm and the second article quite vanquished me. I simply would not have believed that anyone, not even you, could give that subject such vigorous and picturesque treatment. I wish I had read more political history. I feel so sure that this is not only very different from but greatly superior to any other historical writing of this kind we may have, that I’d like to be able to say so with authority. You see I know very little about these things, but these tariff articles seem to me very much the most important things happening in magazines just now.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
/> In late January 1907, Cather went to Boston to continue her work on the Mary Baker Eddy series, which had already started running in the magazine.
TO HARRISON G. DWIGHT
January 12 [1907]
New York City
Dear Mr. Dwight:
I don’t believe God owed you Italy. You just went and took it. And I am sitting here this tepid rainy day envying you. I’m sure you’re working and happy—but perhaps it will make you even more satisfied with your destiny to hear what I am doing. Perhaps you dont know it, but we are publishing a series of articles on Christian Science and Mrs. Eddy which have made a great sensation and run our circulation up into incredible thousands. They are the work of a thorough investigator but a very untrained writer and it is necessary to work them over very thoroughly in the office. Mr. McClure tried three men at this disagreeable task, but none of them did it very well, so a month ago it was thrust upon me. You may imagine me wandering about the country grubbing among newspaper files and court records for the next five months. It is the most laborious and sordid work I have ever come upon, and it takes every hour of my time and as much vitality as I can put into it. When it is over I am promised six months abroad on full salary, but I doubt whether what is left of me by that time will be worth taking across the Atlantic. You cant know, never having done it, how such work does sap your poor brain and wring it dry of anything you’d like to pretend was there. I jump about like a squirrel in a cage and wonder how I got here and why I am doing it. I never in my life wanted to do this sort of thing. I have a clean conscience on that score. Then why am I hammering away at it, I’d like to know? I often wonder whether I shall ever write another line of anything I care to. It seems rather improbable that I shall. I do not believe people often get out of this sort of coil, once they are in it. My mind is so full of other things that notions have simply stopped coming my way. I don’t feel any impulse to work—or to do anything except grind and “edit.” All this should make you feel that cheerful sense of being alive that we have when we hear that someone we know is dead. I hope you’ll go for a walk and have a gay dinner after you read this—I want you to appreciate your good luck.
Tell me, why do you so scorn [Pierre] Loti? If anyone told me they saw a trace of Loti in anything I had done, I’d swoon with joy. And here you are indignant at such a suggestion. I don’t know the new one you read but “Le Pecheur d’Island”, “Le Desert”, “Le Roman d’un Spahi” and a dozen more are surely among the most beautiful things in the world. They stir one up like music and steal your senses away in the same fashion. Why do you scorn him? I cant make you out. Why are you afraid to touch the poetic aspect of things when you all the time want to. Take that story “Mortemain”. If you’d thrown away what smelt of slang and Kipling and kept what was really your own story—which happens to be like Loti’s own—I dont see why it might not have been a very perfect thing. But it seemed like a compromise—a purely imaginative and poetic conception tricked out with a little slang and a few colloquial phrases to disguise it from the eyes of the scoffer. Are you afraid of being called serious and imaginative? Why do you have to make friends with the college boy and the cub reporter by throwing in a good-fellow phraseology? Why do you go in for any disguise, whether smart or jaunty? Why are you such a mortal coward about fine writing? I wish you’d try hitting out squarely—give an imaginative subject a treatment in the tone of the conception, build up your mystery and illusion instead of hinting at it in a curt colloquial remark. I doubt whether the colloquial ever really suggests your kind of thing anyway. It may serve in stories of violent action, but I dont believe it is effective where the point of the story is a perception, or a feeling. I have it now! You are afraid of being sentimental. Yes, I believe that is the solution. So you try to compromise by being slangy. I wish you’d try the other way—Loti’s way, and not try to crawl out through Kipling’s expedient.
Now I have something to tell you which I hope will please you—supercilious though you are. We sent “The Valley of the Mills” to London to Frank Brangwyn (the best painter of oriental subjects alive) and have squandered five hundred dollars on him, for which sum he is to lavish colored pictures upon you in his best manner. Of course our color reproductions are usually very poor because we have to print 500,000 copies while Scribners, for instance print only 80,000. Hurried printing is ruinous to color work. Still, we shall do our very best with these. We are planning to use the story in the August fiction number. It would fair turn my head if Brangwyn were to illustrate a thing of mine. I think he does the most glorious work of the decorative sort that appears now-a-days.
I was in Pittsburgh two months ago and had a delightful glimpse or two of the Willards.
Of New York there is little to say. It is as big and raw and relentless as ever and grinds one up into little bits every day. Hideous literature is produced as fast as the presses can grind it out. [Wassily] Safonoff, the new conductor of the Philharmonic, and the opera are the only things that save my soul from death.
Here’s hoping all the good in the world for you, and do let me know about what you are doing. I’m eager to see some work from you. Please ask Mr [Paul Revere] Reynolds to send it to me personally, as otherwise it might be merely ground in the mill and never get to me at all.
Faithfully always
Willa S. Cather
The Loti works Cather mentions above have been translated into English as An Iceland Fisherman, The Desert, and The Romance of a Spahi.
TO WILLIAM E. CHANDLER
July 16, 1907
Boston
My Dear Mr. Chandler;
In the last chapter of our “History of Christian Science” it will be necessary to take up the litigation now in progress, and I fervently hope that by that time we shall be able to set down in our chronicle the result of the action. The most human and interesting way to treat this episode, I think, will be to approach it through a review of George Glover’s relations with his mother. I am going to Nebraska to visit my family in about ten days, and I should like to go on further west and see Mr. Glover. Could you give me a letter to Mr. Glover or to his daughter? If you would feel at liberty to suggest that they talk freely to me, I shall be very glad indeed to submit to you the proofs of the article making use of the information they furnish me. This article would not be published before February, and in submitting the proofs to you I shall ask you to cut out any statement of Mr. Glover’s which might be detrimental to his interests.
I should like, if possible, to get a full and detailed story from Mr. Glover in the first place, and then cut out whatever you wish me to cut.—Of course the article will not be written in the form of an interview—Even if I use very little of his information, I can, of course, write much better from a full knowledge than from a superficial one. If you feel that you can conscienciously recommend my discretion to the Glover’s, you would be giving very material assistance to Mr. McClure and to me.
Mr. Peabody says you have been unable to find a copy of the 1881 edition of “Science and Health”. I have one of my own which I should be very glad to lend you for the next few weeks if it will be of any service to you. If you would like to have it, I can mail it to Waterloo at once. If we have anything else that could be of use to you, please do not hesitate to command us.
Very sincerely yours
Willa Sibert Cather
Cather spent her time in Boston not only working on the Eddy articles, but also getting to know something of Boston’s social world, notably celebrated hostess Annie Adams Fields and her companion, author Sarah Orne Jewett.
TO ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS
Wednesday [probably early 1908]
Parker House, Boston
Dear Mrs. Fields
I shall be so glad to see you this afternoon at five. You will not think me importunate for having telephoned so often, will you? You see I have wanted to know you and Miss Jewett for so many years, and as my time is short now I cannot bear to go away without having seen more of you.
Sincerely
Willa Sibert Cather
Included in Cather’s letter to her brother Roscoe, below, was a receipt from Melvin W. Kenney, 65 Bromfield Street, Boston.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
March 2 [1908]
My Dear Roscoe;
Is it too late to thank you for the nice l[e]tter you wrote me at Christmas time? I came back to Boston in January, had a delightful two weeks with Mrs. Deland and the[n] came back to my old happy home at the Parker House—the best hotel for dignity and solid comfort that I know in America—hasn’t changed a bit since [William Makepeace] Thackeray stayed here many years ago. I have been meeting a great many delightful people here, the most cultivated and brilliant people I ever met anywhere. One of the particularly attractive men in Boston is Winthrop Ames, grandson of Otis Ames. He is a patron of the arts, especially of the drama, rather given to Ibsen, handsome, young, and somewhat tired of life. When you sit at dinner with him talking about [Frédéric] Mistral and the tendencies of the modern drama, your mind harks back to that windy mountain top with its red granite boulders and the monument to Oakes and Otis [near Laramie, Wyoming]—no world-weariness or Ibsen for them I trow! So it goes. The sons of the barbarians do have to pay a heavy price for their enlightenment. Perhaps in future years, when our part of the world has found itself, sophistication wont hit so hard, but now the men first acquainted with the tree of Knowledge are apt to have the colic. You remember the gentleman’s speech about the Northmen and the Troll Garden [from Charles Kingsley’s The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures].