by Willa Cather
No, Dorothy, our men went into action at Chateau Thierry on the 31st of May, 1918, and the Marines marched in Paris on the Fourth of July.
There are a hundred things I’d like to tell you the how and why of, and as I’m going over these proofs I’ll write again.
But how I laughed when you lighted upon Claude and David’s violin. That, my dear, I didn’t get from any soldier boy. That was the way you made me feel when we were in France together that time; and that was the way that I made my poor cousin feel. You never meant to, you couldn’t know it? Neither could David! neither could I, when Grosvenor’s lips used to twitch and curl. It’s the way helpless ignorance always feels, and so many of the best of ours felt it in France. This book gathered up everything; even you did not escape, you see.
All the same, it’s a war book, and most of my few readers, even, won’t give it a chance.
But of all these things, much more hereafter.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Friday [probably April 7, 1922]
Dear Dorothy:
Of course I’d rather have you write a review of Claude than anybody else. You know all the factors; you know me, and It, and Claude—the West, the War, the doughboy. It’s such a thankless task that I would surely never be the one to suggest it, but since you suggest it, I’m selfish enough to grab. Knopf is out of town. When he returns I’ll consult him. If you undertake it, I’d like it to be the authoritative review, and to be where it would count most.
Of course the fact that my cousin was the germ of the book is between you and me—that’s not the public’s business, I’ve never even mentioned it to Knopf. I don’t know myself how much the character is Grosvenor. It’s a good deal me, a good deal one of my brothers—a sort of composite family portrait. And when I saw so much of the wounded men in the Polyclinic, so many of them seemed to me more or less like Claude, that he gradually came to mean for me–––well, young America in the war, especially the American country boy. That was why I tried not to make the latter part too individual, and tried to keep it within the consciousness of such a mind; a mind so intelligent, so sympathetic, so uncultivated, so jealously honest. It’s rather hard to say anything about France through such a medium—that’s why I did things like using “enragé” for the baby—I always tried to use french words enough like English so that the women in Red Cloud—where there is not one french dictionary!—could tell what they meant by the look of them. But I suppose the laws of the french language won’t relax—even for Red Cloud!
Victor’s [Victor Morse, character] elderly charmer wrote on her photograph à mon aigle—being as he was an air-man and she very subtle.
Well, I’ve accomplished something if after twenty years I’ve got across to you what the roughneck, the sensitive roughneck, really does feel when he’s plunged into the midst of–––everything. It’s not only his vanity that suffers—though that very much—; he feels as if he has been cheated out of everything, the whole treasure of the ages, just because he doesn’t know some language or play some instrument or something. Those experiences are very terrible—they have even effected the history of the world (“The Dying Goth”). I found so many of the sick men I got to know had suffered that chagrin, and had brought back with them another wound than the one on their leg or breast—a wound that would ache at odd times all their lives, and that wound made them wiser, always. You see we had no colonies; for the first time our uncultivated thousands were brought up against older civilization—it really was like the Crusades—but why tell this to you, who know it all better than I? But when you hit on Claude and David as enlightening, that revealed to me instantly where I really got Claude and David. David is David Hochstein—all the same, the emotional picture is you and I, in France, twenty years ago. And now, after so long a time, it “gets” you. I have my revenge! In a very joyful form, too. And that’s the way old suffering and old chagrins ought to work out in the end. But its a long journey between being burned at the stake and being able to write about it agreeably. No ray of hope gets across to one then.
But it was because I happened to be there on the farm with Grosvenor when the war began and saw its effect on him, and because I had a blood-identity with him—a Siegmund und Siegelinde bond, the woes of the Volsungs—that I had the courage to try to write a young man’s story. Life became a series of assignations, of stolen interviews with Claude. He met me when I walked in the park; in the middle of a symphony concert he was suddenly at my shoulder. I always had tea alone that first winter, hither and yon, for I never knew when he would appear and sit opposite me and let me feel his strong shoulders and stubborn head. Oh that was life at its best, that first winter—life and complete possession. I was always frightened and nervous about the last part, but even that shadow couldn’t kill the joy of that perfect companionship. I envied no man his adventure in those days.
And now–––well now its pretty bleak, and that is where you help me. Now when I can do nothing more for him, what is there to do? I feel as if he had drained my very power to care for things. At least, that part of me must have a long rest. I paid out everything I had. The pile of rejected chapters would make a book. Yes, I have to thank him for these wonderful years. He will never bring back what he cost in mere money—he was an expensive boy to keep, I had to travel with him and cut off any source of income to give him a perfectly undistracted mind. But it was worth going into debt for—a fortune could not buy such excitement and pleasure.
I wonder whether in your secret heart, you will think it worth all this? Well, it was to me: and that’s the only answer to the question of what anything’s worth. For days and days together I was somebody better than myself. Three intense hours with him every morning, and the rest was wreckage–––sleep, and that queer physical feeling of resting myself in his stronger, younger body. Like Mrs. Wheeler [character] I used to say to him “rest, rest, perturbéd spirit.”
After all, isn’t a game so vivid, so long sustained, worth anything, everything to the player. “Game” is a disgusting word—it was companionship with a human soul.
I’m in bed—still very flabby—so excuse lead pencil. Thank you for listening.
Willa
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Saturday [probably June 17, 1922]
Dear Dorothy;
Sometime when you come back from Rome won’t you let me come to talk to you about a few things that I want to talk of with you more than with anybody else? Futurist painting, and ‘wide open’ art, and the vanishing conception of Sin, which is going to leave people of our profession bankrupt. I’d give a great deal to have a long session with you about these things. We knew one world and how we both felt about it. We now find ourselves in quite another. I wish I knew how it all strikes you.
Anyhow, it’s a great pleasure to me to see you looking so well as you did yesterday. You were much too thin when I saw you a year ago, but now you look absolutely yourself, as if your life had made you more and more yourself instead of different and strange, as it does so many of one’s old friends. I’ve rushed at you for Claude as if he were a sick child and you were the doctor, but when that is over I don’t see why we shouldn’t have something for ourselves.
I sent the proofs to Arlington this morning. There is no need for you to send them back, so don’t add that to the chores of departure. You can cut them if you wish to quote. I forgot to tell you that I’d rather you didn’t hint it was about anybody of my own name and blood,—otherwise there are no restrictions of any kind. No use my trying to tell you how grateful I feel to you for undertaking this review in the hurry of departure, when you of course ought to be hoarding every bit of your strength for your own book. If I were very noble, I’d have snapped [Sinclair] Lewis up last night and taken this task off your shoulders. But I’m not noble enough for that. Long before you came to see me last year I’d been wishing I could get your impression of this story. I felt that nobody I knew had both ends of [it] in hand like you. And I felt that li
ke me, you knew that I was almost the last person to do such a story; therefore, if it got across, you would instantly recognize it.
I did enjoy the party last night. Harcourt is fine. He’s a new type of publisher to me, and a very engaging one. I felt less of the hopeless constraint that I always feel with publishers with him than with any other man of his profession I’ve ever met; as if I had some common language with him. You see vellum and hand-laid paper mean nothing to me, anymore than they would to “Claude’s folks,” as you happily termed them. I know they are meant as a compliment, and try to look pleased, but they leave me cold. I have my own kind of fastidiousness, but the idea of twenty-five dollar books for collectors is repulsive to me–––it’s making a lot of dead books. I should think it would make even booksellers feel that this is a sort of George Moore affair. I had not heard of this lovely plan before, and it rather floored me when he sprung it on us. Lord, what did vellum mean to Claude, or his dear, dear Mother? And sure this book was written to them, if ever one human being did a thing for and to another. All I got out of it was to be close to their noble selves as I could get in no other way. I forwent all splendor, went without adjectives like going without sugar, and Italian paper is wasted on Claude, ought to be used for other books, with other lips and other hearts. But enough–––I know you understand perfectly, and it’s a world of comfort that you do.
Yours
Willa
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Wednesday [probably June 21, 1922]
Dear Dorothy
The amount of ground you got over on Claude’s account when you were in town (to say nothing of all the other things you did) writing ads and signing slogans! The “slogan”, by the way, was an invention of Knopf’s. He blushed very red when he said he thought I said you’d said something of that sort in a letter. When I declared you never did, he murmured “Oh, never mind!” I’m doing my best to get the price reduced—the difficulty is that it will, he argues, make trouble about his other $2.50 novels, “Cytherea” [by Joseph Hergesheimer] in particular, if he cuts the price on this one. But of course my future relations with him depend on what he can do with this book, and he is fully aware of that.
It does seem a shame that you will have to bother about that review on a sea voyage that ought to give you nothing but rest and relaxation for your own work in Rome. You probably won’t have a typewriter and will have to worry it out by hand. I only hope you won’t have to take those heavy proof sheets along with your cabin luggage,—that you remember it well enough and won’t have to carry pounds of Claude out to sea! How that to-me-unknown man, Mr. [John Redwood] Fisher, will hate me if he has Claude stuffed into his steamer trunk!
Well, I’m looking forward to your return and for the day with you you’ve promised me, when we can begin to talk about everything that has happened in the world, and to us, since the years when we used to talk. So far, I can see in you only the things I always knew in you—there must be some changes, but I suppose its the person one knew that one looks for first. As I think I wrote you last spring, I’ve always dreamed about you, and I don’t dream a great deal—at least not the kind of convincing, sane dream that one remembers after one wakes up. And in dreams there was never a shadow of change or misunderstanding. I remember once, away back when I was in England for McClure’s, I had such an extraordinarily strong and living dream that when I awoke I resolved to write you and tell you I thought there must be something in it, when a feeling like that, a sense of perfect accord and harmony, with such happy affection, persisted on underneath life, in spite of changed conditions. But there was really, then, no way to say such a thing without blubbering. Think of it, that was actually before Freud had escaped into the English tongue, at least, and there was no sub-conscious—except that which everybody always knew there was—from personal experience. But I can remember half-a-dozen or more dreams like that, years apart, and they always pleased me. I never wakened with the bitter feeling that I had been fooled, with that a delightful feeling and a delightful part of my life had been revived for a little while. Now I suppose a Freudian would explain all this quite glibly, but I prefer my own explanation. I always knew that sometime I would be in touch, in some actual relation with you again. There were certain feelings connected with you that never changed a particle. And isn’t it funny; when one is ancient enough to begin to look back on one’s own youth as an ended thing, then the people who were the lovely and precious figures acquire a sudden clearness, our minds turn and clutch at them, it is almost as if we saw them clearly for the first time. I came to the reflective stage later than most people—until four or five years ago it was impossible for me, like abstract reasoning. My mind couldn’t be made to do it. Then quite naturally I found myself drifting into it. And that process brings one close to the figures in that world behind. And what a dear figure you were in it, absolutely the only younger person for whom I had any deep affection. The people I liked were always years older, if not hoary with age! The young ones were blank sheets of paper. The only trouble with you was that you always had so many engagements which I considered trivial!—like taking a fencing lesson with Jessie Lansing. I could not see why you would not rather translate Victor Hugo for me. (I shall give out an interview someday on you as I first remember you. I can do a nice picture of you.)
If you are to live on the road to Versailles and I am to live on the same road, I should think we might meet up whenever you didn’t have to fence with Jessie Lansing or go to a faculty party. I suppose now you fence with Sally [Fisher], though! But as for you and me, that was always one of the things which ought to have come out right, and it will, if we give it half a chance. I am just as sure of it as I am that everything was all right once. And what a deep pleasure it can be to both of us,—if for no other reason than to remember what tremendous excitement we used to find in each others society, the times when you came to Pittsburgh for instance, and the time I went to Vermont.
I feel as if you’d sort of rescued Claude, Dorothy, as if you’d snatched him up when he fell and born him off through the fray. When I was reading proofs alone up at that sanitorium, I surely learned how black defeat can look. The book seemed dead. Then I got home and found your letter and that he was alive to you. You’d caught him like a ball, and the world has looked cheerfuller to me ever since.
So lovingly
Willa
TO SINCLAIR LEWIS
June 27 [1922]
Dear Mr. Lewis:
Dorothy wrote me that you are going to review “One of Ours” for the Post, and that’s a great satisfaction. At either a funeral or a wedding one wants one’s friends and not hired men to act as ushers—and this will be either a funeral or a wedding! I’m sure I’m not noted for bragging or over self-confidence, but nobody ever does a book as much beyond their normal best as this is beyond mine, and then repeats. You can only do it once. That’s honestly the way I feel about it. I will never expect as much of myself again. When you read it, I’m sure you’ll understand why.
I’m joyful to have met the Lewises at last, and I’m sure you’ll let me know when you’re in town (what a silly idiom, as if we had but one) in New York next winter, and we can each talk about our new books! With heartiest regards to you both,
Willa Cather
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
September 1 [1922]
Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada
Dear Carrie:
Nothing that “Claude” can do for me will give me more pleasure than your dear letter—few things can give me as much. I woke very early this morning and watched the dawn come over the sea, feeling so glad and grateful that my book had gone home to you like that. Long ago, in my lonely struggling years when I was learning to write and nobody understood what I was trying to do, and I didn’t understand myself,—I used to think bitterly, (oh so bitterly!) that no matter how well I got on, I could somehow never write the kind of thing that would seem interesting or true to my own people, and they
would never know how much I loved them. I had to live among writers and musicians to learn my trade, but I do think my heart never got across the Missouri river. And now you do all know, after all—at least those of you I love best know. Claude and his mother are the best compliment I can pay Nebraska.
I am sending your letter to Isabelle in Paris, for she will know how much it means to me to have touched my old friend’s heart like that, and she will share in my thankfulness and will send it back to me—to keep in my writing desk forever, along with the one you wrote me after your mother’s death. I am so grateful to have been able to get my story and my boy to you so entirely. Things have turned out very well for me at last, you see.
Lovingly always
Willa
I go back to New York next week.
Knopf released One of Ours in September of 1922. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s glowing review appeared in the New York Times Book Review on September 10. H. L. Mencken’s and Sinclair Lewis’s reviews both found the last half of the novel unsuccessful. Mencken began his review, “Miss Willa Cather’s One of Ours divides itself very neatly into two halves, one of which deserves to rank almost with My Antonia and the other of which drops precipitately to the level of a serial in the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Though the novel was praised by many reviewers, many of the most prominent panned it and said that Cather had particularly failed in her representation of the war.
TO ELSIE CATHER
[Probably September 16, 1922]
Dear Elsie:
Poor Claude seems to have kicked up the devil of a row. He is not regarded as a story at all, but as an argument, as everything he is not. Lots of my old best-friends don’t like it; Mencken thinks it a failure, Fanny Butcher wails forth her disappointment. They all expected it “would be just like Antonia” they say! It’s hard to part with old friends, but one can’t be a trick-dog and go on repeating even to please one’s friends. It’s a parting of the ways, I’m afraid, and here I lose friends I’m sick to lose. They insist that I could not resist the temptation to be a big bow-bow about the War. “The other books were personal, this is external” they say!! Of course the people who are for it are just as hot, but they are rather a new crowd, not the old friends I liked to please. I always hate to lose old friends. Well, we never get anything for nothing, in life or in art. I gained a great deal in mere technique in that book—and I lose my friends.