by Willa Cather
I’m glad F.G. sent you “Antonia” because I’m so pleased and happy at what you say about it. I didn’t send you one because when I finished it the waters of bitterness simply closed over my head. When I finished the proofs it seemed to me that nothing—simply nothing had got across. When I wrote you I wasn’t on speaking terms with the book, and I was trying to forget it. Now when people like you like it, I feel better about it. You see I liked it at first, while I was writing it, and then in the proofs it seemed a gray waste of dullness. It came out while I was at home and my father said it was all so exactly the way he remembered it, that I began to feel encouraged. If it lightened up a few hours in the hospital for you, that is an especially nice association for me to have with it.
It’s cruel how many boys have died in our training camps here. Before I left Red Cloud we had seven funerals in one week for boys who were sent home from Camp Dodge, Iowa. The rumor is that more of our boys have died in camp at home than have been killed in France.
I’ve talked over the telephone with Mrs. Boas, who had not heard of your illness and who will write you at once. She is nice, but somehow so German! I like outright pro-German better than Pacifists, with their wise talk. I suppose you’ve heard all about the high cost of living. The monthly meat rise is a thing to weep over. New York was never so gaudy and extravagant. What you say about things abroad is discouraging. Come home as soon as you can and recover from it all—then go back to France and finish your work. Maybe you’ll find that this terrible thing you’ve had to go through will bring good things to you as well as bad—that is bromidic, but so many bromides are true. It’s a queer world we look out upon, isn’t it? With Germany howling to be fed first and most! But at any rate, come home and rest. I wish I could send you all sorts of nice things from my very loving and admiring self, and from all the people who love and admire you. You are very rich in friends, you know.
Yours always
Willa S. C.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
December 8 [1918]
[Possibly a continuation of the unsigned November 28 letter above]
My Dear Roscoe;
It has been a long time since I began this letter to you. The town is full of newly returned soldiers now; I have been seeing as much of them as I can. They like to talk to almost anyone who will talk to them about France.
I am sending you a copy of one of the best reviews, from the Sunday “Sun,” a full page with a large photograph of me. I had some copies made because in these paperless days one can’t get extra copies of Sunday papers. This man surely had a good time with the book. It amazes me how many people feel that way. I thought nearly everybody in this country had to have a story. I never did like stories much, and the older I grow the less they interest me. I see and feel only the carpenter work in them. In this book the pitch of life as it was lived isn’t raised half a tone, and yet, you see, how many people do like it. Professor Geoghegan writes me that it is certainly the best novel that has come out of America. “We know,” he says, “that perfect art returns to nature, bu[t] only a very great artist can so return, or can make the nakedness of nature beautiful in art.” Yet Father likes it “as well as any book he ever read.” I feel well content to have touched two extremes. If only I can do as well with the next!
I am so happy that Virginia’s coat is a success. Mother sent me part of Meta’s letter that told about it and also about your family whooping cough. I was at Trix Mizer’s this summer when her six began to whoop their heads off.
Now goodbye, my boy, forgive this scrappy letter and write me when you have time. I am always glad to hear about everything that goes on in your pretty little house. Tell Meta to write me when she can. I am wrestling with the Blue Mesa story a little; but the commonplace way to do it is so utterly manufactured, and the only way worth while is so alarmingly difficult. Wish me luck!
Lovingly
Willie
Cather took a keen interest in the American soldiers returning home from the war. According to Edith Lewis, her old student Albert Donovan, who was in the army and in New York, would bring a few servicemen with him when he came to visit, and she also visited wounded soldiers at the Polyclinic Hospital.
TO META SCHAPER CATHER
December 27, 1918
My Dear Meta:
The box of jams and jellies that you and Roscoe sent me is perfect for afternoon tea—all done up in cunning little jars, and such strange and interesting varieties! So far I have tried only the Citrus Jam, and it is delicious! They came in such a lovely box, too. I shall use it for ribbons after I’ve eaten all the jam. I feel that I have cut myself off from a great pleasure this year in not sending anything for Santa Claus to give Virginia and my cunning twins. I’ve sworn that I won’t let the chance escape me next Christmas. You see, to get things there on time, one has to buy and send before the Christmas feeling is really in the air here. About December 20th I began to wish I’d sent some funny little things for your babies. Then it was too late. I’ve put “toys for twins” down on my 1919 calendar, and I’ll write you for a list of their desires in November.
I don’t do much now but run about to see wounded soldiers. They are nearly all fine fellows—I don’t see how one country can have so many nice ones and so few rottens. A marine dined here last week, hung with medals a king might envy, and as he said “There’s one subject you can always pull the U.S. Marines together on–––La Belle France.” They were in France long enough to learn to love it, and they had the Blue Devils [a nickname for French soldiers during World War I] for their first teachers and drill-masters. And the brave always love the brave. I’ve always loved France so much that I can’t help getting tearful when the lads talk about her. They don’t care a damn for her intellect or her art; they’ve learned to love her industry, her sobriety, her courage. And what it has done for them–––! Street-boys, farmer boys, any old boys–––they have a kind of gracious grace. A one armed lad who was here on Xmas eve could eat, and seat his hostess at the table, so deftly with one strong, warm, brown hand. After dinner I went to the theatre with six of them who had landed that morning—six western boys alone in New York on Christmas Eve. We had some time, I can tell you! No, I don’t do anything but run about with soldiers. They come in from Europe now at an average of five thousand a day, and to most of them this city is stranger and more confusing than Paris. On Christmas Eve there were 30,000 soldiers and sailors, on leave from camp, tramping the streets of New York hunting a good time. I wanted to go to the theatre with them all!
May you all have a Wonderful New Year
Affectionately
Willie
With the end of World War I, Cather’s attention was turning away from My Ántonia and toward a new novel. It was to be a Nebraska story again, at least partly, but would have its action in the thriving, established farms of the early twentieth century, just before—and during—the great war whose conclusion all were now celebrating.
TO CHARLES F. CATHER
December 28, 1918
My Dear Father:
Have you succeeded in loaning any more of my money yet? I hope Mr. [Joseph] Topham will pay his interest promptly this year. Don’t forget, when you send it to me, to take out the money I borrowed from you when I left home this summer. The royalties on my new book are not due until April. I have had to ask for an advance of two hundred dollars from the publisher, but I don’t want to ask for more if I can help it.
Please tell me, father, is it a binder or a reaper that has a big wheel at one side with wooden slats across it? That’s a poor enough description, but I think you will know what I mean. Maybe it isn’t a wheel, but it looks like one, and its much taller than the rest of the machine.
I am fairly well, and am at last getting down to work on my new book—but it is a long hard road ahead, this time.
Lovingly,
Willie
PART SIX
A Change of Publishers and One of Ours
1919–1922
—WILLA CATHER TO FERRIS GREENSLET, May 30, 1919
Willa Cather in Cavalière, Provence, France, with “Claude” under her arm, 1920 (photo credit 6.1)
WITH THE GREAT ACCLAIM evoked by My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s literary reputation was made. She was not convinced that her financial return on the book was what it ought to have been, however, and for that she blamed Houghton Mifflin’s ineffective (so she believed) publicity campaign. Her conception for her next book, One of Ours, which she always called “Claude” after its central character, came to her even before My Ántonia was published, when the death of her cousin G. P. Cather in battle brought her passionate distress about the war to a focus. As she neared completion of the long manuscript, a series of minor irritations with Houghton Mifflin fueled her interest in choosing another publisher. When the young Alfred A. Knopf proposed bringing out a volume of her short stories, retaining some of the stories in The Troll Garden and adding several new ones, she agreed. Pleased by the quality of Knopf’s work on that volume, Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), and his belief in her as an artist, she then granted him the contract for One of Ours (1922). The reviews were mixed, with some of her former critical champions actually dismissing the novel, but she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it. Under the savvy guidance of Alfred Knopf, it became the best-selling novel of her career thus far and established the financial security that would support her creative work for years to come.
In his review of My Ántonia in the December 14, 1918, Dial, shortly before his death from influenza, Randolph Bourne wrote, “Here at last is an American novel, redolent of the Western prairie, that our most irritated and exacting preconceptions can be content with.” Foreshadowing Cather’s own statements about the art of the novel, he praised her book for having “all the artistic simplicity of material that has been patiently shaped until everything irrelevant has been scraped away.”
TO ROSCOE CATHER
Sunday [January 5, 1919]
Dear Roscoe;
The other day I sent you an important notice of Antonia by a critic who has since died of influenza. He was the ablest of our critics, and I had rather dreaded his review. He gave me some sharp knocks on the Song of the Lark, though he liked the first part of it very much. I like his comparison of the book with [William Allen] White’s. Long before I began to write anything worth while, I hated White and [David] Grahame Phillips for the way they wrote about the West. I knew that there was a common way of presenting common life, which is worthless, and a finer way of presenting it which would be much more true. Of course Antonia’s story could be told in exactly the same jocular, familiar, grapenutsy way that Mr. White thinks is so American. He thinks he is presenting things as they are, but what he really presents is his own essentially vulgar personality. I don’t deny that Mr. White sells a thousand to my hundred, but nobody can really reach both audiences, so I don’t bother about that, so long as I have some of the savings of my old McClure salary left to live on.
Weeks ago I got such a heart-warming letter from a former president of the Missouri Pacific, Edwin Winter, who as a young man helped to carry the U.P. [Union Pacific] across Nebraska, and who built the bridge over Dale Creek canyon–––the first bridge, which was of timber! He asked if he could come to see me, and on Friday he came. Such a man! all that one’s proudest of in one’s country. He picked the book up in his club and sat right down and wrote me the most beautiful of letters. I’d rather have the admiration of one man like that than sell a thousand books. He said that reading the story was a stirring adventure to him, that he felt as if he must get at me at once somehow, and he wondered if I were a Swede, because, he said, “the book looked to me too much like literature to be American.” I feel that I’ve made a new friend who is going to teach me a lot and give me a great deal of pleasure. He has the most brilliant mind I’ve come up with in a long while, and such a vast and varied experience. I think I must copy his letter for you, sometime.
Please send the copy of the Dial and the notice about poor Bourne back to me when you’ve done with it. Tell Meta I am still eating that delicious jam on my toast at tea every afternoon when I have tea at home. I have finished the scuppernong jam, and am now on the pineapple. I wish I could have been with you for the Holidays.
[Unsigned]
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
January 6 [1919]
Dear Mr. Greenslet:
Thank you for the check on account.
The “Globe” telephoned me this morning to say that they had not yet received a copy of my book. I am sending them my own and only copy. Will you please send me a book and charge it to advertising?
Have you tried any of the English publishers, now that the war is over? I think this book would get an audience in England. I suppose you have seen poor Mr. Bourne’s very gratifying review in the “Dial.”
I have written four chapters of the soldier story. To be truthful, it writes itself. I don’t believe I contribute any more than the ordinary “writing medium.”
Faithfully
Willa Cather
Throughout the winter, Cather continued to correspond with her family, friends, and publisher about the positive response My Ántonia was getting. Edith Lewis got the flu, but recovered; Cather, luckily, did not catch it. Greenslet continued to give Cather unenthusiastic reports about the sales of the novel: they were having trouble getting an English publisher to accept it and the sales were “steady” but not “strong.” Then, in May 1919, he wrote her about the debit against her royalties due to the excess corrections that she asked for after reading proofs.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
May 19 [1919]
New York City
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
I have waited to answer your letter because there are several things I want to take up seriously with you, and yet I do not exactly want to risk a talk with you, because you can frequently persuade me against my own judgement.—
While you were away MacMillan’s sent for me to see whether I would let them have a Western story to go in a series of American novels they are bringing out. I said, unwisely, that I was not free to do so. During the last few years I have met several propositions from other publishers in the same way. I hate the bother of changes, and business transactions are never a pleasure to me. I have avoided talking to publishers because it made me restless and discontented, and because my relations with you, personally have always been so pleasant, even in business. But this bill for proof corrections has brought things to a head with me. I do not think it a just charge. I kept duplicate proofs, with the corrections, until after your first statement came in; then, as there was no charge entered, I threw them away. I do not think it is the custom of publishers to make these charges in the case of painstaking writers in whom the publisher, so to speak, “believes”. I have just seen some of Mr. [Theodore] Dreiser’s proofs; his books are practically re-written in proof, and he is never charged a cent for corrections. Do not Houghton Mifflin make this charge as a sort of luxury tax on a carefully written book? I don’t mean I doubt that there is some charge from the printer, but it seems that a publisher usually pays this charge for a book he wants and is glad to handle.
MacMillans, whose books are well printed, tell me that the cost of composition on a long novel at the present time, is about $600.00, and that author’s proof corrections cost about a dollar an hour. If my book cost $500.00 for composition, then by the 20% quoted in the contract, you would give me a h
undred dollars’ worth of proof corrections without charge, would you not? Add to that the amount you take out of my royalties, and we have author’s corrections amounting to $244.00. Is it possible that it took one man thirty working days to make my corrections? You may tell me that the Riverside compositors charge more per hour, but why, after all, should your authors be charged more than MacMillans’?
Within the last few weeks, three New York publishers have made me definite propositions for my next book, offering better terms than my present publishers make me; in addition to increase in royalties and $1000.00 to $1500.00 cash advance on delivery of copy, they offer to give the book and me much better advertising than I have hitherto had. One firm has outlined an advertising scheme which seems to me excellent. They believe that the aim of advertising is not so much to sell one particular book, or to be careful to come out even on one book, as to give the author a certain standing which would insure his future and interest in his future books. Houghton Mifflin’s policy may work out well for them as a business policy, but I do not think it works out well for me. I think the recognition of the public and reviewers has outstripped that of my publishers. This has been borne in upon me by a hundred little and big things until it has become a conviction. The publishers have made no use of this growing appreciation, and take no account of any evidence of it except the evidence of sales, which, with work like mine, is not indicative of the real interest.