by Willa Cather
Isabelle and I are going to sail for Naples either on the Carpathia (April 8th) or on the Freiderich der Grosse (April 11). We shall spend a week at Naples, Capri and Pompeii, then go to Rome for a time, and then walk about three hundred miles along the Mediterranean shore from Monte Carlo to Marseilles. After a few weeks at Arles and Avignon we shall go to Paris and settle down. We hope to be gone for six months. I got my guide book for Rome the other day. Seems queer to be really on the way to Rome; for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in one’s life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of one’s imagination. Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward school—they were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak.
I don’t know whether I shall come home by way of London or not—seems too bad to miss the chance, for I have letters to Kipling and Maurice Hewlitt and Barry [probably means J. M. Barrie] and [Arthur] Conan Doyle and a lot of people. Just now I am so tired that I do not feel much like people, I want to poke around among vineyards and olive trees and what’s left of the Roman Empire. When you come to study Roman colonization and Roman government and Roman manners seriously, it’s all very different from the simple schoolbook tale—it’s so much the biggest thing that all the centuries have produced and makes our own civilization look a very temporary and tawdry affair. In the south of France, since it is a rather desert country, no big new civilization has come up and effaced Rome—there it all is, theatres, baths, aquaducts; most of the best vineyards were planted under Augustus, and people live just as they do in Virgil’s Georgics. It is just as if that whole Roman worl[d] had been preserved in some clear wine. I’m keen to be there again.
Now my boy, I can get you stunning pictures here very cheaply, but the framing is more expensive than it was a few years ago when I last got any pictures. However, I have been to nearly every picture shop in Boston this morning, and have done the best I could for you. I got seven, and I hope you won’t think they are too expensive. You asked me to get something for myself when I got them. Thank you, my boy, but I’d rather you would have some nice pictures in your house, so my present goes into the chromos, please. Now here is the list of them, and you must keep it. I also send you the framer’s list to be business like, but mine is more full.
Van Dyck’s portrait of himself $2.25
The Windmill (Old Dutch School) $2.25
Song of the Lark (Jules Breton) $3.00
Calling the Moose ([N. C.] Wyeth) $1.75
Indian Hunter (Wyeth) $2.25
“The Dinkey Bird is singing in the amfalulu tree” (Maxfield Parish) $2.85 (In gold)
Caught in the Circle ([Frederic] Remmington) $1.98
$16.23
The last on[e] is not on the framer’s ticket because I got it at another shop. I will send them by freight, collect at your end, for they will reach you more promptly if the freight is unpaid, I fancy, and even then you will probably not get them for weeks. But they will leave Boston Friday, I can assure you of that. I have paid for them, so you owe me $16.23. I do hope you will like them, and that they will please Meta [Schaper Cather, Roscoe’s wife]. It is hard to select pictures for other people, but I think I know pretty well what you like. If you don’t like the [Anthony] Van Dyck I shall hate you. I have one like it, and I think it has given me more delight than any other picture I possess. I got the Song of the Lark because Jessie said you liked it. Personally, I would rather have sent you all brown photogravures of French and Dutch pictures that I like, but I thought you might like some of the real modern fellows better. They are all mighty good reproductions and I am sure they will add to your nice new house and help you to rest and moon sometimes wh[e]n you are tired.
How did you like The Queen’s Quaire [1904 novel by Maurice Hewlett]?
With lots and lots of love too you, my Boy, and hoping that “The Dinkey Bird is singing in your Amfalulu Tree”,
Lovingly
Willie
TO ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS
Wednesday night [probably April 1908]
My Dear Mrs. Fields:
This is to bid you good morning and to tell you how much I hope that you are quite yourself again. I had the most delightful afternoon going through Mrs. Gardener’s house last week. The day was fine, you remember, and there were thousands of daffodils in the court and much yellow sunshine. But I am a haunted creature, I begin to think. In the Dutch room there is a portrait of Mary Tudor which looks so much like Mrs. Eddy that I positively fled. I seem in a fair way to become a kind of terrible modern Midas.
I took some books back to the Public Library tonight, and instead of tearing up my card I asked them to keep it for me until I came back. That made me feel that I really am to come back. I first came to Boston last January and arrived at the Parker House at midnight with Mrs. Eddy for my guiding star. I had to get to work that very first morning, and as soon as I had breakfasted I humbly asked the clerk to tell me where the Common was. He informed me with great consideration for my feelings, and I went out and succeeded in finding the Common! Since that morning I have liked Boston better and better every day. It is the only city I have ever lived in that I have cared about, and I am downright homesick at leaving it. New York always seems to me like a beleaguered mediaeval city, with all sorts of atrocities going on in the streets, and one has to go about armed, so to speak. I shall always come back here every time I can, and I shall hope to see you every time I come.
I cant help groaning a good deal that Mr. McClure did not come up and take me to see you a year ago. But I should think, instead, of my good fortune in coming to know you at all. Mrs. Eddy has been a hard mistress, but hereafter I shall always think that, in some mysterious way, she and her affairs brought me to know you and Miss Jewett, and that you are, in a manner, the rewards of my servitude. This may sound like empirical reasoning, but I shall stick to it, for it is the one course of reasoning which makes the year’s work seem worth while to me.
So, if you and Miss Jewett do not object to being considered as the Rewards of Industry, then I can write as do the contributors to the Christian Science Journal, “To our Beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy, I owe a great happiness etc.”
If I do not see you again before I go, I shall look forward to the autumn, and I beg you to let me send you a note now and then this summer.
Faithfully
Willa Sibert Cather
The home of collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner is now a distinctive art museum in Boston, and the wonderful collection remains as Gardner eccentrically arranged it. Flowers continue to bloom in the glass-topped garden courtyard. The Mary Baker Eddy look-alike is a mid-sixteenth-century portrait of Mary I, Queen of England, by Dutch artist Antonis Mor.
In April 1908, Cather and Isabelle McClung left on their second trip to Europe, this time to Italy. “If Blood be the price of admiralty,” below, is a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Song of the Dead.”
TO ROSCOE CATHER
April 18 [1908]
Royal Mail Steamship “Carpathia”
My Dear Boy;
At three oclock this afternoon we sighted Portugal, Cape St. Vincent, and ever since we have been sailing very softly along this shore which is pretty nearly holy ground to them as speak the English tongue. In a few hours we will be in Trafalgar Bay, where [Horatio] Nelson broke Napoleon’s fleet for good. He chased the French fleet all up and down this coast as far as Cape St. Vincent, and the bottom all along here is strewn with the bones of Frenchmen and Spaniards and Italians that went down. Our English captain confessed to me this afternoon that he never steams down this coast without thinking of it and setting his heels tighter on his bridge. I keep seeing Nelson on his great column in Trafalgar Square in London, and thinking of the letter he wrote Lady Hamilton [Nelson’s mistress] the night before the battle, which I saw in the British Museum. All up and down here Nelson chased them. “If Blood be the price of admiralty.” I love to think of all those bones along the bottom here
. I love to think of the little admiral chasing them up and down. I love to think how here the English navy was exalted above all the navies of the earth. And when he had chased ’em up and down and cleared the waters of ’em, the little admiral up and died. And they put him up on his column in London and [Edwin Henry] Landseer made his bronze lions to guard him, and the English people loved Lady Hamilton better than the queen because Lord Nelson had loved her.
I wish you could see these soft gray waters, and the wild bleak Portugal coast, and could sit here with me and think about all their bones down below.
[Unsigned]
The following was written on a postcard with a view of the Santa Lucia Hotel and Mount Vesuvius in Naples, Italy. The hotel is circled, and next to it Cather wrote, “our hotel.”
TO ELSIE CATHER
[Late April or early May 1908]
Naples
Dear Elsie—
Here we are and it is like this only a thousand times more beautiful. We have a balcony facing on the sea, which is much much bluer than in this picture. The most beautiful gardens are only two squares away, and all the world seems like fairy land.
Willie
TO ALICE E. D. GOUDY
May 3 [1908]
Santa Lucia Hotel, Naples
My Dear Mrs. Goudy
My friend and I have just come back from a week up in the Apennines where we have had some wonderful long walks visiting some old forgotten monasteries where there are only one or two monks left. In one splendid old building we found but one lonely monk. It is high on a mountain top and very few people ever take that terrific climb over a ruined mountain road. We found some wonderful latin manuscripts in his crumbling library. In another monastery, the famous Benedictine abbey of La Trinitá della Cava, we found the original code of the Lombard League. The place was founded by a Lombard king in 1030. It is a great rambling white building built against the side of a perpendicular cliff and below it is a dreadfully deep wooded ravine to which you can descend by flights of steps cut in the cliff. Down there the angry little river Bornea leaps along under its stone arches and turns the wheels of half-a-dozen little stone flour-mills set here and there down the narrow, winding valley.
I spent two long days in Pompeii, which is so much more wonderful than anyone can ever imagine, and have returned here [to] spend some time looking over the great Pompeiian collection in the Naples Museum. I love Naples and am living in a most delightful hotel situated right on the Bay of Naples which, I am convinced, is the most enchantingly beautiful body of water in the world. I have marked my balcony in the picture at the head of this hotel paper. I sit there every afternoon and watch Vesuvius change from violet to lilac and then to purple. I could almost throw a stone over to the tiny island of Megares [Megaride] where Lucullus had his gardens and where Brutus met Cicero after the murder of Caesar. The street singers sing all the old Neapolitan airs under my window every night, and every morning I go out and buy roses and camelias on the Spanish Stairs. The gardens in Naples are beautiful, and the Royal Museum is the richest in portrait sculpture I have ever seen—the British Museum seems quite poor in comparison. The portrait sculpture of the Roman Emperors, particularly of the Antoinine house, leave nothing to be desired. The royal families appear in youth and age, and I feel as if I had known every member personally. I have rubbed up my Latin enough to get through Tacitus and Suetonius quite carefully. This is the place to read those detailed historians, for details cannot mean much unless you are in the place where it has a physical and concrete reality.
There was a photograph of the wonderful head of Caesar at the Naples museum in the copy of Allen & Greenough’s “Gallic War” which I read in Red Cloud under Mr. [Alexander K.] Goudy. I always knew I should see the original some day, and I thought of Mr. Goudy when I came across that great head the other day in its lofty marble gallery. Of all the statues of Caesar I have seen it is the most wonderful. Such a head! Napoleons is a wooden block compared to it. I go back and back to it and I doubt whether the world has produced another such head in all the centuries since.
We spent a good deal of time in the vineyards and fields last week. The oranges and lemons are ripe in their orchards and the peach and cherry trees are in bloom. The vines are in little new leaf and the olive groves all along the Mediterranean are so soft and gray. All the country folk are in the fields digging and planting the fall crop, and they do it just as Virgil describes in the Georgics: the same heavy hoes, the same white saplings for the vines, the same old songs as the husbandmen toil along the furrows and work this old, old earth which has produced most of the beautiful things in the world.
Next week we go to Rome, but I shall leave Naples and the soft Companian country with tears, I am afraid. Such a ravishing world and such a short life to see it in!
Lovingly
Willa
TO SARAH ORNE JEWETT
May 10, 1908
Hotel & Pension Palumbo, Ravello, Gulf of Salerno
Dear Miss Jewett,
Do you, I wonder remember what an extravagantly beautiful place this is? The camelias are all in blossom in the Rufolo gardens and our hotel is over run by yellow roses. I have one of the rooms on the terrace which hangs above Minori and the sea. You probably remember what a magical aspect the sea presents from that terrace—very much like hot green porcelain whose flow has been chalked by those jagged cliffs along which runs the Salerno road. From here it is certainly the sea of legend—nothing else, and it glimmers centuries away from you, like the opaque blue water that [Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes painted. When I was little I knew a funny old lady in Nebraska who had some water from the Mediterranean corked up in a bottle, and when you looked at the bottle for a long time and suddenly shut your eyes you saw the sea itself for a moment, and this was the way it looked—a color and a remoteness that exist in legends and nowhere else. But the color one does find elsewhere, after all. I have seen this turquoise kind of green in Japanese porcelain, haven’t you?
Seven hundred years ago yesterday a galley from the Holy Land first brought St. Andrew’s skull to Amalfi, in Amalfi’s time of sea-sovereignty. Every hundred years the arrival of the skull is celebrated. On Wednesday the skull was taken up from the crypt and sent down to Sorrento. It was brought back to Amalfi yesterday by a fleet of forty-seven vessels, and the cardinal from Rome was down at the marina to receive it. The bells in Ravello rang all day long and the whole countryside trooped down to Amalfi. I fell in with a priest and a lot of old people who were hurrying down the footpath that outruns the carriage road. We were all feeling gay and tramping hard, and all wore our best things—except the priest who wore his old cassock and carried his best one in a handkerchief. But just as we were hurrying over the one place where the wood path winds out a hundred feet above the carriage road, yes, just at that identical instant, some people from Nebraska, whom I had not seen for years and years, swung into the carriage road, and by some diabolical presbyopy recognized me and shouted and gesticulated and haled me from that glad company. I shall probably not see those good people for a dozen years to come, but I had to go back to Ravello with them and lose the festa and my pleased companions. I have felt as if I were being put through the world by some awfully complicated kind of clock-work ever since.
The volume of Mrs. [Alice] Meynell’s essays [The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays] you gave me has been an inexhaustible delight. Do you remember the one which she calls “The Lesson of Landscape”? It seems to me about the only truthful writing I have ever read about Italy—in English. I cannot, alas, feel that Vernon Lee is altogether, or even measurably, truthful. Surely she is capricious and self-conscious and she takes liberties with things and places to get her effects. But Miss Meynell tells the truth—How beautifully truthful she is about all this pale-colored lovely earth, and how her words show the frugality and temperance that it ought to teach one. What a coarse and stupid conception of Italy we have all been reared upon! A tufted Monte Carlo palm garden sort of country.
/> But Mrs. Meynell has a fellow in the truth. Housman—A.E.—did a little poem which rings in my ears all day when I tramp about the gray terraced mountain sides and go in and out among the fields, so little and precious and dear-bought. It is not in “The Shropshire Lad”, but he gave me a copy of it, and I must quote it to you here, at the risk of misquoting it. My copy is in Pittsburgh, and I have never seen it (the verse) anywhere else. I never cared about it much until I left Naples three weeks ago, and then it rose out of the limbo of forgotten things and smote me full in the face.
THE OLIVE
The olive in its orchard,
If man could plant it sure,
The olive in its orchard
Should flourish and endure.
So deep among the trenches
Its dressers digged and died,
The olive in its orchard
Should prosper and abide.
Thick should the fruit be clustered
And light the leaf should wave,
So deep the roots are planted
In the corrupting grave.
That’s the Italy I have found—just about all of it. And how miraculously true the truth is! This morning when the Cardinal visited the church here and all the children for miles about came up the hill before his carriage carrying big olive branches, what incredible lightness and spring it had, that hard, dry, sharp, little leaf that is so tempered to dust and wind and sun and damp and drought.
Betsy Lane has gone spiriting on to Rome in my other trunk, but the “White Heron” and the Dulham Ladies abide with me always. Ah they are like the olive leaf—“si triste, si gai [so sad, so gay].”
Faithfully
Willa Cather
Cather’s memory of the Housman verse, which was published The Outlook in June 1902, is not accurate in all details, but well remembered in general. “Betsy Lane,” “the ‘White Heron,’ ” and “the Dulham Ladies” are references to Jewett’s works: the short stories “The Flight of Betsy Lane,” “A White Heron,” and “The Dulham Ladies.”