by Willa Cather
In February of 1923, on the heels of One of Ours, Knopf published a special edition of Cather’s poetry, titled April Twilights and Other Poems. The volume included several poems from her 1903 book, plus several new poems that had previously been published only in periodicals. Elmer Adler of Pynson Printers designed and printed the first limited edition.
TO ELMER ADLER
Sunday [probably January or early February 1923]
New York City
Dear Mr. Adler:
What a beautiful book you sent me yesterday—and what beautiful roses! We will set a new standard of relations between writer and printer. The pains you have taken with this volume and the absolutely satisfying result you have achieved have quite revived my interest in the text. I hope you can do another book for me sometime. I am very proud of this one, I assure you.
I will come to your office Wednesday afternoon a little after four, and you can take me to your place, as I have forgotten your house number.
Please accept my warmest thanks for the flowers, and my heartiest congratulations upon such a fine piece of work as this book.
Cordially yours
Willa Cather
With the success of One of Ours, Cather got her wish: a publisher who would know how to market her books and stimulate good sales. As she soon realized, such success had its obligations. Cather became acquainted with painters and writers Earl and Achsah Brewster, to whom the next letter is addressed, by way of Edith Lewis, with whom Achsah had attended Smith College.
TO EARL AND ACHSAH BARLOW BREWSTER
February 21 [1923]
Dear Earl and Achsah:
How often I’ve wanted to answer your dear letters about “One of Ours”. But I went home to my parents’ Golden Wedding, and life caught me up and carried me furiously away. I understood exactly what you meant about Howard Pyle. This book has been a new experience for me. The people who don’t like it detest it, most of the critics find it maudlin sentimentality and rage about it in print. But the ex-service men like it and actually buy it. It has sold over forty thousand now and is still selling. I’ve had to take on a secretary to answer the hundreds of letters I get about it. The truth is, this sort of success does not mean much but bother and fatigue to me—I’m glad I never had it before.
I am so glad the Hambourgs chose the “Blue Nigger” [painting by Earl Brewster] and that I shall soon see him again. The photograph you so kindly sent me has just come and is a great pleasure, but it makes me long for the splendid color of that painting. We have had the greatest happiness from the picture we brought home with us, and do you know, I have come to like the “Three Scallops” [another painting by Brewster] best of all of them!
I will sail for France about the first of April. Ah how lovely it will be if I can meet you in Paris! That seems about too good to happen in this pesky world. I beg you both to write often to Edith while I am gone. I must tell you a secret that is a little difficult to tell: Edith does not like the Hambourgs at all—never has. They irritate her, rub her the wrong way; Isabelle even more than Jan. I think it’s been hard for her to face that they were seeing you this winter when she was not. We are like that about the people we love best sometimes, we have a kind of loving jealousy about them. It has always been difficult about the Hambourgs, because they are old and dear friends of mine, and yet they do darken the scene for Edith whenever they appear—put rancours in the vessel of her peace, as Macbeth said. I think the way that likes and dislikes interweave is the most disheartening thing about life anyway. It’s nothing Edith can help; their personalities simply hurt her. She feels that their attitude toward her is rather patronizing, but there I feel sure she is mistaken.
I hope Edith can see a great deal of you if you are in America this summer. Your being here will make up to her for my absence. As you know, she does not care for a great many people, and for them she cares very much. This has been a hard winter for her—her family has made such heavy demands upon her and she has not been very well. Before a great while I am going to get her away from all these hard and wearing things.
If you come to America this summer you will have an exhibition here in the fall, will you not? There would be time to give one here in the early fall, before you return to Paris. We thought the notices of your exhibit in Paris this fall were splendid.
I do hope you have got Edith’s box by now—she took such pleasure in arranging it. She sent a beautiful one to me in Red Cloud, too. Dear friends, there are so many things I wish to say to you—about painting, about writing, about ourselves and this queer business of living. I can only recall some lovely hours we spent together in the twilight at Naples and hope that they will come again. This has been a hard winter for everyone I know in this part of the world. The Golden Wedding and my Christmas at home was the one thing worth while for me. But since then a thousand stupid interruptions have kept me from work—and when my work is interrupted nothing compensates.
We both send you our dearest love and wish you happy working-days with all the deep satisfactions they bring. I wish Edith and I could be with you next year. I believe we could all help each other.
With love and happy memories
Willa Cather
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Sunday [probably April 1, 1923]
Dear Dorothy;
It was heartbreaking to miss you, when if I’d known the day before, or Thursday morning, I could have arranged it so easily. Josephine was ill, so I sent her home and told her to go to bed, and I decided to devote the day to dismal chores. I left the house at ten, had lunch and dinner up town, and didn’t come home until nine at night. At that hour I was too beat out to go over to the pay station to telephone your mother’s apartment,—and by that time you were probably gone, or just getting ready for the train. It was an utterly wasted day, and the afternoon of it might have been so nice! Well, things have been going rather that way lately; the mechanics of life have been grinding hard since I got back from my wonderful time in the West. However, it’s silly to get discouraged; my cold is gradually departing, I’ve been hearing some glorious music, and behind the music a few comfortable ideas are stirring to make me feel that there is something worth—to me—carrying on the routine for. The funny thing is that one can never make publishers and editors and friends see that with a story just forming you have to be alone like a thief hiding from the police,—alone with just the precious, cursed stuff you have stolen and are hiding from everybody. How much I owe to the non-success of those early books! I dropped them into the void and there was no come-back, no fuss, nothing to get in the way of the next one.
No lectures for me till I come back from France, my dear! I’ve had to take on a secretary [Sarah Bloom] to take the people who want lectures off my back. She told me last week that she’d written nearly a hundred letters declining lectures for me in the last four months. People don’t in the least want one to write—perhaps what they really want is a vacation from having to bother about one’s books at all. Well, Dorothy, they are not going to spoil things for me, so there! Be witness to my bold boast. I don’t really mind not being read, (not a whoop, really–––some times a little fussed, but nothing deep.) But if they devil me so I can’t write, they destroy my game, my fun, my reward, the whole splendour and glow of life,—all there is for me. And they shant do it, damn them! You’ll stand by me, won’t you, and understand that I’m not being disobliging?
Yours always
Willa
On May 14, 1923, shortly after Cather arrived at the Hambourgs’ home near Paris, Alfred Knopf sent the cable that announced her Pulitzer: “Claude wins Pulitzer prize. Hearty congratulations affectionate regards.”
TO ALFRED AND BLANCHE KNOPF
May 16 [1923]
Ville d’Avray, France
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Knopf:
I nee[d] hardly say I was delighted to get your cable! So many cablegrams arrived that day that Ferruccio, the Italian man-of-all-work, thought another war had broken
out. I hope the publicity will stimulate sales and will be good for you as well as for me. Those High-Brows, Heywood Broun & Co., will storm worse than ever and say it’s but one step more to Mary Rinehart.
I have a gratifying statement from Houghton Mifflin; Antonia sold 3,000 in the last six months and The Song of the Lark 600.
The Oliver typewriter which Mr. Samuel Knopf ordered sent to me has not arrived, and after a gay week in Paris I want to get to work and need a machine. Will you please find when it was shipped? If through some mistake it was not sent at all, I may have to buy one here, though they charge twice what Olivers sell for at home. If the machine was sent and is on the way, will you please cable me to that effect as soon as you get this letter?
I had a wonderful week in Paris all alone. I am much better in health and am feeling very jolly over the Pulitzer prize. Please write me who the judges were. I couldn’t have got it if [William Lyon] Phelps was still one of the judges.
With warmest greetings from the Hambourgs and myself
Yours
Willa Cather
Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung Hambourg in Ville d’Avray, France, 1923 (photo credit 7.2)
In the spring of 1923, Judge Duncan Vinsonhaler of Omaha, Nebraska, contacted Cather to express the desire of the Omaha Society of Fine Arts to commission a portrait of her to hang in the Omaha Public Library.
TO DUNCAN M. VINSONHALER
May 23 [1923]
Paris
My Dear Judge Vinsonhaler:
I am greatly flattered and deeply pleased by your letter. Sooner or later I will see that my Omaha friends get a portrait if they want one. I ought to be able to get a good one made here in Paris—perhaps I can find some gifted young American artist—if not, a french one. Just now I am so beset by photographers and interviewers, french and American, that I haven’t time for anything. This is apropos of the Pulitzer Prize, of course. Unfortunately the cable announcing the award to the Paris papers said that it was a “war novel”, so the French journals keep sending men to get my opinion on the present political crisis in France.
Please accept my friendliest wishes, and greet the [Harvey] Newbranch family for me. I will go ahead and hunt a painter in the near future, and send you a report of what progress I make with him.
Cordially yours
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
June 6 [1923]
Dear Mr. Knopf:
Please give the enclosed to Mr. Oppenheimer for publicity. Isn’t it a joke, with those two numerical titles? “One of Ours and Three Soldiers by two Americans”, as one of the french papers puts it! The dinner was to have been given for me and your Spaniard, [Pío] Baroja, but he characteristically didn’t get here, so the Secretary snatched up [John] Dos Passos.
It has been black winter here for one month, with rain every day. I am daily awaiting the typewriter. Is Claude still selling, by the way?
With best regards from all of us
Yours
Willa Cather
The following postcard to Edith Lewis—showing Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s La Naissance de la Vierge from the Louvre Museum—is one of only two surviving pieces of correspondence from Cather to Lewis.
TO EDITH LEWIS
Sunday [summer 1923]
Paris
A whole morning alone in the Louvre. This will recall to you that lovely group of Spanish pictures at the far end of the long hall. I still think the Murillo Virgin the prettiest woman in the world, and I still love the [Jusepe de] Ribera Nativity [Adoration of the Shepherds] and its homely shepherds.
W.S.C.
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ
August 11 [1923]
Ville d’Avray, France
My Dearest Irene:
I have wanted to write you ever since I first arrived in France, but this has been a hectic summer. You probably know that the city of Omaha raised a fund and asked me to have a portrait painted for them—your own idea, you see! I was terribly puzzled about choosing a painter, and I at last decided on Léon Bakst, who did all the costumes and settings for the Russian Ballet, you know. He happened to be in Paris just now, and he was the most interesting man in sight. He seldom does portraits, but some french friends of his like my books and told him about them, and he said he’d like to paint me. It’s a long story, how I came to meet him, and someday I’ll tell you all about it.
I will certainly be at home for Christmas this year, and I hope to go out to Red Cloud the first week in December. I hope you can go then, too. I’ll have so much to tell you about this lovely house of Isabelle’s and all the delightful people I’ve met.
Bakst is distinctly “modern” in his painting, you know, and rather fanciful. He won’t do a photographical likeness for anybody. Yet I think this picture will look like me in the end. Of course the Omaha people won’t be satisfied—people never are with a portrait, but they ought to know his name well enough to be glad to have a picture by him.
With my love to you and Mr. [Charles William] Weisz
Yours always
Willie
Fastened at the top of the second page of the following letter is a clipping with horse race entries and the name “Red Cloud” marked with a note written beside it: “See! A horse named Red Cloud has been winning some races in Paris!”
TO ELSIE CATHER
August 11 [1923]
Dearest Sister:
Yesterday I had my first sitting with Leon Bakst. He pronounces his name just like the past tense of the English verb “to box”; that is just as if it were spelled Boxed [in cursive writing], Boxed [printed]. But if you prefer to give the one and only vowel in his name a middle-West sound, why then you can pronounce his name so that it rhymes with WAXED, as in “the floor was waxed.” You must instruct father and mother and the two Virginias how to call his name, as it will be much mixed up with mine for awhile.
His studio has three enormous rooms, and they are full of beautiful things from all over Europe and Asia. To sit there for two hours in the afternoon is like going to church—a church where all the religions of mankind come together in one great religion. He is just one of the simple people I have always loved—like Annie Sadelik and Joe Pavelik Sr. and all the friends of my childhood. He is reading “One of Ours” with the help of a dictionary, but he speaks little English. He speaks to me in French and I reply in English. He began by telling me Russian fairy tales, and is going to tell me stories every sitting, he says. He is doing only my head and shoulders, and thank Heaven did not want me to “dress up”. He selected a green georgette waist I happened to have, with a little gold in it, loose and plain, like a Russian smock or a middy-blouse.
Not since the days when old Mr. Ducker used to talk to me in the store and spit tobacco juice all round me, have I had such an experience as this, or been so much the pupil sitting at the feet of the teacher. I think the hours will fly by in those great quiet rooms. You wouldn’t believe the neatness and order of them—never a pen crooked on his many desks, all that marble and bronze and porcelain dusted every day. You can touch a hundred objects, even the portfolios of drawings and never have a particle of dust left on your fingers.
Now goodbye, I’ll write you when Bakst and I are further along.
Lovingly
Willa
TO DUNCAN M. VINSONHALER
August 27 [1923]
Ville d’Avray, France
My Dear Judge Vinsonhaler:
(1) First let me acknowledge receiving from you a check for one thousand dollars, which shall be endorsed to Mr. Bakst as soon as the portrait is completed. The work has taken much longer than he thought at first, and both he and I need a rest from it. I had no idea that sitting for a picture was such hard work. I have not been in the best of health this summer, and now I am going down to Aix-les-Bains for three weeks. When I return I will have three more sittings with Bakst for details of the figure—he eventually did a half-figure, seated, with the hands. The face will be practically completed in
tomorrow’s sitting, and I think the likeness very unusual.
(2) I know that my parents will want to go up to Omaha to see the picture, but I don’t know about asking them to unveil it. You know old people are sometimes very much fretted and wearied of doing something a little unusual, and both my father and mother are rather nervous people. Won’t you let me put the question to them and then follow their wish in the matter? I know you would not want to put any sort of strain on them. I think it likely that they would much rather sit quietly by, with no responsibility, and let my little niece, Virginia Auld, unveil the picture. (By the way, Judge Vinsonhaler, I wish pictures didn’t have to be unveiled! And won’t you do what must be done just as quietly and simply as possible. I like to feel that you want my picture because of a feeling of friendliness, because I’ve pictured truthfully the life you know. Don’t, please, let people like Mrs. [Margaret Badollet] Shotwell [of the Omaha Daily News] turn all this nice feeling into cheap newspaper copy and make me heartsick about it.)
To return to my little niece, she is a great pal of mine, and I think her grandmother would love to have her for an understudy. She’s a charming young girl, and not a bit cocky.
(3) Bakst is to have an exhibition of his work in Philadelphia, in November, and in Boston in December, and he asks permission to exhibit this portrait among his other pictures. I don’t feel that I can grant him this without the consent of your committee, but it is customary to extend this courtesy to painters and I hope to hear from you that your committee is willing. In that case, he will select the frame—a very important matter—though the frame would probably have to be made in New York.