by Willa Cather
The following was written on a postcard showing the view from Villa Doria Pamphili, Rome, Italy.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
June 10 [1908]
Rome
My Dear Roscoe: This is the dome of St. Peter’s from where I first saw it—one of the wonderful Roman gardens. It looms up from the east wherever one turns, and after you stay about the church and the Vatican and the catacombs for a time it is borne in upon one that there is where the modern world was born. From the day Charlemagne was crowned there and before, the Vatican was fashioning modern Europe. Next in wonder to the Rome of the Empire is the Catholic Rome of the middle ages.
Willa
The following was written on a postcard showing a view of Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, Italy.
TO ELSIE CATHER
June 16 [1908]
Rome
My Dear Bobbie: This is the Tiber with St. Peter’s and Hadrian’s tomb. It is such a lifeless, discouraged little river. Yesterday we spent all the morning in the old Palace of the Caesars—such millions of poppies as do grow over them. All the rooms are taller than the Stand Pipe (Red Cloud measure) and there is an enormous race track inside the palace. Last week I walked so long in Caesar’s home one day that I had to stay in bed the next.
W.S.C.
The following was written on a postcard showing canals in Venice, Italy.
TO ELSIE CATHER
July 8 [1908]
Venice
My Dear Elsie
Isabelle left me yesterday and she sails for home from Genoa tomorrow. I follow her two weeks from today and sail on the Königin Louise, arriving in New York August 6th. I wanted two weeks more of Venice, but I am so lonely that I scarcely know whether it will pay.
Willie
The following, on a postcard with a view of the Hotel Royal Danieli in Venice, is one of only two pieces of correspondence from Cather to Isabelle McClung known still to exist.
TO ISABELLE MCCLUNG
July 14 [1908]
Venice
I have been to Santa Maria della Salute this morning to see another Titian and a beautiful Tintoretto. Please do not give away the Bacchus and Ariadne to anyone. I want us to have that for ourselves. I have bought some other pictures but not that, and I love that best of all. You are in the Atlantic now!
W.S.C.
Upon returning to New York, Cather resumed editorial duties at McClure’s and moved to a new apartment at 82 Washington Place, only a couple of blocks from her first Greenwich Village apartment. She shared this new apartment with Edith Lewis, an arrangement the two would maintain until the end of Cather’s life.
TO SARAH ORNE JEWETT
October 24 [1908]
New York City
Dear Miss Jewett;
Your letter reached me on a gloomy and tired day and such a new heart as it gave me. It is so true that “great worries make little frets”, and that worried people become sour and disposed to find faults. Let me take that as a rebuke, whether you meant it so or not, for it is a rebuke that will do me good. The fact that both you and Mrs. [Annie Adams] Fields felt vitality in the first chapters of Mrs. [Mary Augusta] Ward’s story has cheered me mightily. I am sending you a letter from her in which she outlines the rest of the story. I am now ransacking libraries to find material on divorce for her. I sent her off a bundle of pamphlets yesterday.
I knew Mr. [Charles Eliot] Norton’s death would be a sorrow to both you and Mrs. Fields, and I thought of you both when I saw the headlines announcing it. Mrs. Fields is the only one left who can evoke that vanished time that was so much nobler than this. How she does evoke it! I think it never had much reality for me until that afternoon when I first went to her house on Charles Street, and she sat in the window with the fine broad river and a quiet sunset behind her. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt that we had any past—of that kind—of our very own, and I went out with an exultant feeling of acquisition. I dont think she said anything about those old chapters of her life, but one got the feeling of them almost more than if she had. That is one reason why I love her verses to the Charles River. The moment my eye fell on them they brought back that first meeting with you both—a thing so long waited for.
What joy I have had from “The Singing Shepherd,” which you marked and tied up for me with your own hands. I love “Blue Succory” and “An Autumn Bird” [actually, “The Bird of Autumn”] and “Winter Lilacs.” But I think “Still in Thy Love I Trust” is perhaps the most beautiful. That is one of the complete things that give one such complete and utter satisfaction. And then there is dear “Little Guinever,” that is so like a song in some Elizabethan play. How really gay that is, and how it sings.
I feel sure that you are both back in Charles Street by this, and I am hopeful that Mrs. Fields is getting joy out of these soft warm autumn days. “The Gloucester Mother” was copied in the N. Y. Times, and when I was on the train going up to New Haven to spend Saturday and Sunday of last week, I saw a dear old lady cut the verses out of the paper with a hair pin!
Miss Lewis and I are enjoying our apartment more every day, although we lead so dreary, idle lives in it. Mrs. Fields, I know, will exclaim when you tell her that so far we have largely fended for ourselves and have managed to get our own breakfast and luncheon and, about three days a week, our dinner. We dine at the Brevoort [Hotel] on other nights and have a maid come in to clean two days a week. There are good reasons why we should each of us practise reasonable economy this winter, and cooking does take one’s mind away from office troubles. These latter cares will, we hope, be somewhat lighter after the middle of November. Meanwhile, we shall have a pretty thorny path to tread until then. The sales for October were 10,000 more copies than last October, and November has started well.
I have just finished the page proofs of my story [“On the Gulls’ Road”] in the December number. I am afraid you wont like it, dear Lady. The scent of the tube-rose seems to cling to it still. It rather screams, and I cant feel that stories like that matter much. But there is a little one [“The Enchanted Bluff”], which Mr. McClure and Mr. [Edward L.] Burlingame [editor of Scribner’s] sniff at, which I somehow think might interest you a little—because it is different from the things you knew when you were a child. In the West we had a kind of Latin influence, as you had an English one. We had so many Spanish words, just as you had words left over from Chaucer. Even the cow-boy saddle, you know, is an old Spanish model. There was something heady in the wind that blew up from Mexico. I make bold to send this scorned tale (Mr. McClure says it is all introduction) and I pray you cast your eye upon it in some empty half hour. It is about a place a weary long way from South Berwick.
I hope the size of this packet will not frighten you. A thousand good wishes and much love goes with it to you and to Mrs. Fields. Are you rested by this, I wonder, and is your anxiety for Mrs. Fields quite over? I hope so. Good night, Dear Lady.
Devotedly
Willa
The Singing Shepherd was a volume of poems published by Annie Fields in 1895. “The Gloucester Mother” was a poem by Jewett published in McClure’s in October 1908 with an elaborate decoration designed by W. T. Benda, who would later illustrate My Ántonia for Willa Cather.
Cather received encouraging responses from Jewett to the two stories she had sent. In a remarkable letter of December 13, 1908, full of sincere concern and good wishes, Jewett also gave Cather important advice that would permanently influence her writing: “your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on i
t—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.” Cather’s response follows.
TO SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Saturday, December 19 [1908]
New York City
My Dear, Dear Miss Jewett;
Such a kind and earnest and friendly letter as you sent me! I have read it over many times. I have been in deep perplexity these last few years, and troubles that concern only one’s habits of mind are such personal things that they are hard to talk about. You see I was not made to have to do with affairs—what Mr. McClure calls “men and measures.” If I get on at that kind of work it is by going at it with the sort of energy most people have to exert only on rare occasions. Consequently I live just about as much during the day as a trapeze performer does when he is on the bars—it’s catch the right bar at the right minute, or into the net you go. I feel all the time so dispossessed and bereft of myself. My mind is off doing trapeze work all day long and only comes back to me when it is dog tired and wants to creep into my body and sleep. I really do stand and look at it sometimes and threaten not to take it in at all—I get to hating it so for not being any more good to me. Then reading so much poorly written matter as I have to read has a kind of deadening effect on me somehow. I know that many great and wise people have been able to do that, but I am neither large enough nor wise enough to do it without getting a kind of dread of everything that is made out of words. I feel diluted and weakened by it all the time—relaxed, as if I had lived in a tepid bath until I shrink from either heat or cold.
I have often thought of trying to get three or four months of freedom a year, but you see when the planning of articles is pretty much in one person’s head it is difficult to hand these many little details over to another person. Your mind becomes a card-catalogue of notes that are meaningless except as related to their proper subject. What Mr. McClure wants is to make me into as good an imitation of Miss Tarbell as he can. He wants me to write articles on popular science, so called, (and other things) for half of each week, and attend to the office work in the other half. That combination would be quite possible—and, I fear perfectly deadening. He wants, above all things, good, clear-cut journalism. The which I do not despise, but I get nothing to breathe out of it and no satisfaction.
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, [i]t has been progress of the head and not of the hand. At thirty-four [actually, she had just turned thirty-five] one ought to have some sureness in their pen point and some facility in turning out a story. In other matters—things about the office—I can usually do what I set out to do and I can learn by experience, but when it comes to writing I’m a new-born baby every time—always come into it naked and shivery and without any bones. I never learn anything about it at all. I sometimes wonder whether one can possibly be meant to do the thing at which they are more blind and inept and blundering than at anything else in the world.
But the question of work aside, one has a right to live and reflect and feel a little. When I was teaching I did. I learned more or less all the time. But now I have the feeling of standing still except for a certain kind of facility in getting the sort of material Mr. McClure wants. It’s stiff mental exercise, but it is about as much food to live by as elaborate mental arithmetic would be.—Of course there are interesting people and interesting things in the day’s work, but it’s all like going round the world in a railway train and never getting off to see anything closer. I have not a reportorial mind—I can’t get things in fleeting glimpses and I can’t get any pleasure out of them. And the excitement of it doesn’t stimulate me, it only wears me out.
Now the kind of life that makes one feel empty and shallow and superficial, that makes one dread to read and dread to think, can’t be good for one, can it? It can’t be the kind of life one was meant to live. I do think that kind of excitement does to my brain exactly what I have seen alcohol do to men’s. It seems to spread one’s very brain cells apart so that they don’t touch. Everything leaks out as the power does in a broken circuit.
So whether or not the chief is right about my never doing much writing, I think one’s immortal soul is to be considered a little. He thrives on this perpetual debauch, but five years more of it will make me a fat, sour, ill-tempered lady—and fussy, worst of all! And assertive; all people who do feats on the flying trapeze and never think are as cocky as terriers after rats, you know.
I have to lend a hand at home now and then, and a good salary is a good thing. Still, if I stopped working next summer I would have money enough to live very simply for three or four years. That would give me time to pull myself together. I doubt whether I would ever write very much—though that is hard to tell about for sure; since I was fifteen I have not had a patch of leisure six months long. When I was on a newspaper I had one month vacation a year, and when I was teaching I had two. Still, I don’t think that my pen would ever travel very fast, even along smooth roads. But I would write a little—“and save the soul besides [from Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book].” It’s so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul. It’s so foolish to lose your real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase—or of the stock exchange. You remember poor [Oliver] Goldsmith [from “The Deserted Village”]
“And as an hare whom horns and hounds pursue,
Pants for the place from which at first she flew”
It is really like that. I do feel like such an rabbit most of the time. I dont mean that I get panic-stricken. I believe I am still called “executive” at the office. But inside I feel like that. Isn’t there a new disease, beloved by psychologists, called “split personality”?
Of all these things and many others I long to talk to you. In lieu of so doing I have been reading again this evening [Jewett’s story] “Martha’s Lady.” I do think it is almost the saddest and loveliest of stories. It humbles and desolates me every time I read it—and somehow makes me willing to begin all over and try to be good; like a whipping used to do when I was little. Perhaps after Christmas I can slip up to Boston for a day. Until then a world of love to you and all the well wishes of this season, an hundred fold warmer and more heartfelt than they are wont to be. I shall think of you and of Mrs. Fields often on Christmas Day.
Devotedly
Willa
[written in the top margin of the last page:] As I pick up the sheets of this letter I am horrified—but I claim indulgence because I have left wide margins.
Cather met Zoë Akins, the writer to whom the following letter is addressed, through her work at McClure’s. The two remained friends until the end of Cather’s life.
TO ZOË AKINS
January 27, 1909
New York City
My dear Miss Akins:—
I was so glad to hear from you and delighted to hear about the funny negro family. What a rich sort of people they are in imagination, after all!
I am sending the verse back to you. None of it is adapted for magazine publication. The short one, “The Road”, is not quite up to the standard we try to follow, and the good ones are much too long. One of the long ones, “L’empire de l’amour”, has real merit —feeling and melody. In some places it falls to a rather childish form of expression—the first five lines in part II, for instance,—but I think there is real poetic feeling in it.
I wonder if you will ever settle down and do something with all your might and main, and whether it will be verse, or playwriting, or what? And whether you will ever cease to coquette with the stage. Perhaps it will be better if you don’t. Playwriting, if one has a gift that way and if one cares about the stage, must surely be a most delightful occupation as it is a most remunerative kind of work. About these things I know very little and can give you no suggestions.
The older I grow the less interest I have in the theater. I used to care a good deal about Miss [Ellen] Terry and was interested in Mr. [Richard] Mansfield. I still feel a good deal of interest in George Arliss, but for the most part the work that is being done on the stage just now does not happen to be the sort that I can get any satisfaction from. I have a sort of feeling that your real gift lies toward playwriting; some of the verses that you have sent me have, I think, fancy and melody in them.
Whatever your work may be I wish you every success in it. If you can once get away from “people”,—the “interesting” followers of this art and that,—and get settled to the work itself, I shall look for something from you.
Faithfully always,
Willa Sibert Cather
TO ZOË AKINS
Tuesday [February 1909?]
New York City
Dear Miss Akins:
It is I who should apologize, and I do with all my heart. That was a harsh blunt-sounding letter, one of thirty or forty dictated in a hurry. Sending things back, when I like them at all, is always a hard business for me—I never get used to it. And I am afraid I am often curt when I honestly feel only regret. I am truly pleased that you like the verses from “April Twilight”, and I like young writers to care for my things—who would not like that? I wonder if you noticed “The Palatine” [poem by Cather], published in McClure’s sometime last summer? I thought it rather better than the “April Twilight” things. I had noticed that one of yours in Harpers and was so glad to see it there. I like the Sapphic verses, too. Please send us some more verse when you feel inclined to do so, and I shall understand that you will not misunderstand if it does not seem to be what we need.–––Do you know Miss [Louise Imogen] Guiney’s work well? Do study “A Wayside Harp” [actually titled A Roadside Harp]. There is a richness and delicacy and restraint there that ought to help all of us.