The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  I went to wildest Maine June 7th and got home only yesterday. My letters awaited me here, so you had no word from me. As I went direct to Portland via New York, I didn’t go near you. I had a glorious time with Fremstad and when I left her dropped down in Mary Jewett’s garden for a few days to recover and get rested. While I was in Fremstad’s camp we did things every mortal minute except when we were asleep, and even then I dreamed hard. She fished as if she had no other means of getting food; cleaned all the fish, swam like a walrus, rowed, tramped, cooked, watered her garden. I was not much more than an audience—very little help, but it was the grandest show of human vigor and grace I’ve ever watched. I feel as if I’d lived for a long while with the wife of the Dying Gladiator in her husky prime, in deep German forests.

  I think Thornton Oakley [American artist and illustrator] is a really big man. He once did some wonderful things of Pittsburgh and the mills. He’s never commonplace. An illustrated book on Provence would have more “drive” in the market of a motor-mad world, than a book of essays; surely. And Scribners are the best people to handle such a book. I should think you could have an absolute unity of treatment throughout the book, and at the end insert several historical studies for such as would care for them,—among whom I am one.

  The new review sounds promising. I wish we had something of that sort.

  I am struggling to clear my desk and cannot more than salute you now. I shall be starting for the west soon, I fancy. I stayed in Maine longer than I meant to and now must begin to move rapidly. Miss McClung sends her greetings. She will probably go to Italy when I go to Wyoming. I’ll let you know when I go and where. I’ve got to have a run out there before I do much more work. In haste, yours

  W.

  Sergeant’s unillustrated book on France, titled French Perspectives, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1916.

  She did go west soon, and she wrote to her brother Roscoe from their parents’ home in Red Cloud. Her brother James was thirteen years younger than she, and Jack nineteen years younger. She and the two brothers closest to her in age, Douglass and Roscoe, often felt an almost generational distance from their younger siblings.

  TO ROSCOE CATHER

  July 14 [1914]

  Red Cloud

  Dear Roscoe

  I had a thrilling and delightful time in Maine, then stopped in Chicago a few days to attend to some work, and came on home. I will get out to see you sometime this summer, but I can’t tell just when. Things here are in a rather confused maze. I’m afraid James has got father in for a good deal. Houses and farms are going up, wells and windmills being dug and reared, horses and wagons being bought,—and nobody has any heart for farming! James, to be sure, wants to be thus established, but he seems to do no work except to give Jack orders. I feel sorry for a chap who is not strong, but James is surely on the grab, and he does not care how much trouble he makes for other people. All the worry and fret and farm-provisioning of 1893 are being repeated on a costlier scale, and mother and father are 20 years older. Father looks sick and tortured with worry all the time because he has to spend so much money, and he seems unable to say “no”. Jim has the key of the situation; he simply worries father down. You know father would do anything—forge a check—if you nagged him enough. Douglass is here and is doing all the work on Jim’s property, and he keeps things from getting altogether away from father. For years father has lived so pleasantly here, and now its 1893 over again. I’ll write you again when I learn the run of things better. It’s not quite clear now just which things are Jim’s, and which he thinks are his.

  Yours

  Willa

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  August 10 [1914]

  Red Cloud

  Dear Elsie:

  I am just back from a two weeks driving trip up in the French and Bohemian country—all day on the road or in the thrashing fields with the thermometer often up to 110 and never lower than 90. It was all very fine, but one had to go a stiff pace. I saw many old friends and many places that I often get hungry for. Only the intense heat drove me home at last. I would like to have gone on for two weeks more. All those people are like characters in a book to me. I began their story when I was little and it goes on like “War and Peace”, always rich and various, always so much stranger than any invention of man. Whenever I go back there there is so much to catch up with. I have some friends up there who save all the details for me, of all that happens in my absence.

  I suppose it’s been hot any where, and you seem not to have escaped. I’m not working at all. It was not my plan to work any out here. It’s a waste of time to write when there’s so much doing. If you go abroad in September—but you can’t, now, certainly, with the Kaiser in this high Napoleonic mood. You’ll simply have to stay at home, and maybe that will be good for you!

  I’m not much interested in “letters” just now, but I suppose I shall be when I go back in the fall. Let me hear what you are going to do in case you cannot go abroad. I expect to fall to work in Pittsburgh about a month from now. Fremstad is working hard and firing one cook after another. What a woman she is to look for trouble. Peace is where she is not, and yet it is peace that she’s always looking for. May you have cool weather by this time, and good energy.

  With my heartiest greetings

  W.S.C.

  The following was written as World War I was breaking out in Europe and is one of the very few extant pieces of correspondence between Cather and her beloved friend Isabelle McClung. It was written on a postcard with a view of the Spanish Peaks as seen between La Junta and Hoehne, Colorado.

  TO ISABELLE MCCLUNG

  Saturday [September 12, 1914]

  Spanish Peaks, Near Trinidad, Colorado

  You won’t hear from me for two days after this card, but don’t worry, because I shall be well and happy. Such wonderful country.

  W.

  TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

  Sunday [September 27, 1914]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Elsie:

  I’m back again after an adventurous but not very restful summer. As I seemed to need adventure more than repose, I’m not complaining. I have brought with me my kid brother [Jack] and put him in the Carnegie Technical School, and it is great fun to get him started. He is just off the farm and has never before been out of Nebraska, but as he is candid and honest and has not a particle of vanity, his initiation is very jolly and not at all painful. He will tell people the names and weight of his big work horses, and all about his Bohemian neighbors, and he never tries to talk about things of which he knows nothing, so there are no difficulties. He’s over six feet, rather good looking and twenty years old. I think you would like him, though he will say “yes mam” to older women—older than twenty.

  The war broke in on things a good deal. Even when I was up in the Sangree de Cristo mountains I felt rather restless. One can’t get away from the pull of it because somehow everything one most cares about seems in danger and under test. Before this no one knew how much they cared. I don’t believe we’ll hear much about suffrage and tea-party legislation for awhile. Now, as always, the power to take determines the extent of possession, and that is as far as we’ve got.—Have you see the last six or eight numbers of Punch? Don’t miss them. It’s like going back to Henry Esmond after reading [John] Galsworthy. You feel that the old rock is still under your feet, the rock that is different from any other. Lord, they are a game people, and so orderly in their habits of banking and war. Wasn’t Kipling’s Breighton [Brighton] speech a fine one?

  I shall go to New York for a week in October, but after that I hope to be here until January 1st, working on my story and playing with my brother. I did no work while I was in the west, but now I am taking it up easily and have done a lot in the three days since we reached Pittsburgh. How and where are you? Have you any friends in the French army? You must be kept busy writing to France these days—not that many letters reach their destination—but send me a word, I beg of yo
u.

  Yours

  Willa

  The History of Henry Esmond (1852), by William Makepeace Thackeray, was one of Cather’s early favorites. She once called it “my old friend.”

  TO FRANCES SMITH CATHER

  November 17, 1914

  Pittsburgh

  Dearest Aunt Franc:

  I have been getting through with a great deal of work in the long weeks since your good letter came to me. I am so glad that the flowers reached you at last if they were, like Gilpin’s hat in the old ballad, a long while on the way. I have heard of you since I got your letter from Auntie Sister, and from Mother, who saw Carrie [Cather, Willa Cather’s cousin] at the Bladen Fair. I spent two weeks of October in New York, but I hope to be in Pittsburgh until Christmas.

  Jack is doing well at his school, and I see a great deal of him and often drop in at his rooms when I am out walking. My friends here have been very cordial to him, and he is with older people a great deal, which is very good for him. He has grown much more manly and serious since he has been here, and it is a great pleasure to me to watch him. He says he was never so happy before.

  We talk and think of little but the war. My friend Mrs. Flahant, a Belgian woman, has just landed in New York. She writes me that her brothers and sisters are starving in Brussels. She can get no word or money to them, their houses have been destroyed and they cannot get out. Last night I went to hear an address by Mrs. Vandervelde, wife of the Belgian Minister of State. She speaks English fluently and is in this country soliciting money to feed her starving countrymen. She spoke for more than an hour, and I think I never heard such a good address by either a man or woman. It must be a great joy to be able to do such good work for one’s country. She is not more than thirty, and is a very beautiful as well as a very intelligent woman.

  I have a letter from one of the Belgian Relief Committee in London. He tells me that unless Americans can carry Belgium through this winter, the civilian population must starve to death. Neither England or France can spare anything, and the Germans will allow no food bought in France or England to be shipped into Belgium. The United States is the only power which has official assurance that the food stuffs it sends may go unmolested to the Belgian people. There are now actually four million people there on the point of starvation, more than a million are living on three ounces of flour a day, doled out by the relief committee. There was never such famine before in the history of Europe, and now the hardships of winter are being added. I mean to give no Christmas presents this year, but to give what I can to that fund instead.

  I wish there were some way of arousing the little towns of Nebraska. If every family in Red Cloud gave a dollar or half a dollar, and other towns did the same, think what a stream of money that would soon make. We are the only nation not suffering, and I do think History will be ashamed of us if we are niggardly.

  I am well and hard at work, dear Aunt Franc, and happy to have Jack here. Write me a line when you can, but do not put a tax on your poor eyes. Call Bessie up on the telephone and give her my love and tell her she must write and tell me how you are. Take the best care of yourself that you can, and do not forget that you have a niece who loves you very dearly.

  Goodbye for today

  Willie

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  December 13 [1914]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Mr. Greenslet:

  The novel will be done by mid-summer at latest—perhaps by April—and ought to come out next autumn. It will be fully twice as long as “O Pioneers.” The title is still uncertain. What would you think of “The Song of the Lark”? with apologies to the author of “The Nightingale.” It is, I think, as a story, much more interesting and color-ful than “O Pioneers”—so many more people and places, and I think you will like the heroine. I shall be glad when it is in shape for you to read.

  Faithfully yours

  Willa Cather

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  December 21 [1914]

  Pittsburgh

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  I am pulling off the story at record rate, and enjoying this spree of work so much that I have decided not to go to New York until February 1st. I shall have a large chunk of the book done for you in April.

  Please do stop the war. There will be nothing agreeable in the world until it is stopped. I suppose they will patch up a temporary peace and then, in twenty-five years, beat it again with a new crop of men. I hope to see you in New York when you sail, if not before.

  Honor bright, the new novel is a good one!

  Faithfully

  Willa Cather

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  March 28, 1915

  New York City

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  I am sending you by far the greater part of the novel. The remainder, which is nearly all done, will not run more than twenty thousand words. I think so well of this book that I had probably better not confide to you my own opinion of it. I will say, however, that I don’t believe you publish a story like this every day. I beg you to put it by for a reading until you can take it up with some sense of leisure, for I am hoping that, although you have to read so much, you will have a good time with this manuscript. The manuscript is untidy, but the story is not. I have not had it copied by a stenographer because I did not want to take the time to go over it again and correct the copyist’s mistakes, but I apologize for sending you such messy pages.

  My old friend Mr. [Burton] Hendrick, who is now with Doubleday, came to see me several weeks ago and told me such attractive things about their book-selling methods that I feel rather wistful. They are getting such astonishing results from even “high-brow” slow sellers–––a lot that they took over from McClure’s, of which I know the history.

  I was well satisfied with the advertising you gave “O Pioneers!,” but I think this book ought to be pushed a good deal harder, because I think it has more momentum in it and will go further. I want to sell a good many copies. The next novel will be a New York story, will be long and hard to do. I don’t think it will be as fine as this is at its best; certainly not so lyrical. But if I can write it under good conditions it ought to be very interesting. I shall need money and time, and after I once get it under way, I do not want to stop to write articles and short stories to replenish my bank account. I did not expect a large sale for “O Pioneers!,” but I think this one ought to go thirty thousand. As to length, it will run something over two hundred thousand words, but not much over, I think; say two hundred and ten thousand. It has been a long job, and I am eager to know what you think of the result. I have never had such a good time with any piece of work before. Goodness knows this ought to be cheerful enough for you, happy ending and all! It seems, as I go over it this last time, better than cheerful to me. It seems to have a lot of the kind of warmth and kindliness that can’t be made to order, and that you can only get into a story when the places and the people lie near your heart; when you write of things that, under all the thousand things you like or think you like, have the most persistent and unquenchable reality. The death of the noble brakeman was the original germ of the story, I suppose. It happened when I was about thirteen, and I was “on the spot” as the Red Cloud paper used to say. Ever since then this story has been in the back of my head in one form or another. It has gone through many incarnations, but the germ of it, the feeling of it, has never changed. Long before I knew any singers except the kind described in Bowers’ studio in Chicago, the heroine was a singer. Unless you had lived all over the West, I don’t believe you could possibly know how much of the West this story has in it. I can’t work over it so much that I ever blunt the “My country, ’tis of thee” feeling that it always gives me. When I am old and can’t run about the desert anymore, it will always be here in this book for me; I’ll only have to lift the lid.

  Did you ever hear me talk like a travelling salesman about my own works before? I tell you I’ve got it, this time!

  Faithfully

 
Willa Cather

  On April 5, Greenslet wrote Cather that he enjoyed reading the manuscript but thought the beginning and the ending were incongruent, both in tone and in length; he noted that part one was 162 pages, whereas part five was only 35 pages. He also criticized as too conventional Cather’s choice to make one of her characters, Dr. Archie, the governor of Colorado. And, he noted, Dr. Archie ought not to have been described as playing “billiards” in the opening of the novel, but, instead, “pool,” as billiards is almost never played four-handed.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  Tuesday [April 6, 1915]

  New York City

  Dear Mr. Greenslet;

  Yes, pool, of course. The man this was done from always played billiards and the word came automatically, the moment I began to think of him. I think I would be willing to deprive Dr. Archie of the Governorship and make him a political dictator and the head of a big mining company. But the diminishing scale you noted, after the end of Part II, is really a part of the plan of the book. The latter part of the manuscript explains that plan somewhat, but I would like to talk with you about it. Can’t you come to see me on Saturday or Sunday? Send me a line giving me a hint as to when to expect you, as I have no telephone—and shan’t have until this story is done and off my mind.

  Perhaps the peculiar structure of the story would be better explained if I used a sub-title and called the book; “The Song of the Lark: The Story of an Artist’s Youth.”

  Faithfully

  Willa Cather

  Greenslet claimed to be satisfied at her justification of the “diminishing scale” of the novel, and he sent contracts as well as requests to see the final chapters of the book. When Cather mentioned that there would be an epilogue, he cautioned that it would be important—and difficult—to get it right. Though his words and tone were positive and encouraging overall, Cather was sensitive to the few criticisms he offered.