by Willa Cather
After the exercise I went straight to the President’s supper party, not a dinner, as no one had time to put on evening clothes. I had to meet and talk to all the Trustees and their wives, and the Professors and their wives, and a lot of Cubans and Spaniards and attachées of the French embassy and their wives. They are many of them wonderful people, and it’s all very delightful, and exciting,–––and exhausting. I was a tired creature when I came home in President Butler’s car. If I’d realized it would be such [a] spectacular affair, I’d have sent for Mary Virginia to come down.
I am sending the silk-and-velvet collar of Columbia and the one I got at Michigan, home to Carrie Sherwood to keep for me. They are very large, I’ve no room for them now, and she has made a special place in her spare room to keep such things for me. You can see them, if you wish, when you go home.
I hope and pray you will like your beads, and do not say they are too young, for they are not. Everybody trusts my taste but my family!
In a few days I will send you some envelopes addressed to Grand Manan, where I think we shall go from here. All mail sent to this hotel will be forwarded, however.
With a heart-ful of love to you.
Willie
TO COLONEL BUTLER
June 14, 1928
New York City
My dear Colonel Butler:
I have to admit that I am a woman, and I must also admit that I can make no reasonable explanation of my name. I was born in Virginia, however, and in those southern states it used to be, and still is, very common for a girl to be given the first name of one of her male relatives; sometimes the parents tried feebly to give the name a feminine ending, as in my own case. If I had to be William, I would have preferred to be William without modification. This is a rather long explanation, but you seemed really curious on this point.
Thank you for your appreciative words about the book. It follows very closely the real story of the first Archbishop of Santa Fé and his vicar, and the scene, of course, is laid in a country that I know very well.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO HENRY GOODMAN
October 13, 1928
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Prof. Goodman:
One of my friends who did hear your radio talk tells me that she liked it very much, but that she was a good deal distressed at hearing my name mispronounced throughout. My name should be pronounced so as to exactly rhyme with “gather” and “rather”. I think the name “Kayther” about the ugliest on earth, and I do consider it a hardship that people so often attach it to me. My friend Mr. Mather’s name is always pronounced correctly. Nobody ever thinks of calling him Mayther.
I hope you will pardon my calling your attention to this, but next to being called dishonest, I think I would rather be called anything than Kayther!
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
It was in June, on their way to Grand Manan, that Cather and Lewis first visited Quebec City. Lewis writes in her memoir that when Cather saw the city, she was struck by “the sense of its extraordinarily French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent.” In November, Cather went back to Quebec, this time alone. She was at work on Shadows on the Rock. During this same period she also wrote “Double Birthday,” a short story set in Pittsburgh. Fritz Westermann, mentioned below, was a friend from Cather’s university days and a nephew of Julius Tyndale.
TO ELSIE CATHER
Tuesday [November or December 1928]
Dear Elsie:
Just back from Quebec. I long-distanced M.V. [Mary Virginia] last night to find when her father would be here, and invited the Auld family to dine with me Sunday night.
I enclose letter from Fritz Westermann. You see I took no chances this time! The story “Double-Birthday” has a sketch of Dr. Tyndale in it, so I simply sent it to Fritz and asked him whether I should publish it or not—told him I wouldn’t think of doing it if it would annoy him or the Doctor.
It will be out in the February Forum [then written out more clearly:] (Forum). Dr. Leach says it is the best short story he ever published, but it’s really not much. I can’t work without a house to work in, and I can’t work where I hate my surroundings. I’ve always felt in my bones that Long Beach [California] would be just as you say it is. One has only to reason it out from the people who go there!
With love to you
W.
I think Fritz is real nice and un-grudging, don’t you?
Dr. Tyndale wrote Cather a note saying he was flattered to find any of his characteristics in one of her stories.
TO STRINGFELLOW BARR
December 5, 1928
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Mr. Barr:
I get, of course, a great many invitations to lecture, but very few of them are as tempting as the one you wrote some weeks ago when I was in Quebec. All my letters were held for me here, as I went away to escape from interruptions. My answer, therefore, is very tardy, and I apologize.
I always feel very deeply that I am a Virginian. My mother and father, though they went West long ago, were always Winchester people—not Nebraskans. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to talk for an hour or so to your students, and I hope that at some future time you will renew this invitation when I can accept it. This winter I can not make any engagements of that nature. The last year has been very much broken up, and I have got behind in my work and my life. My father died last spring, and since then my mother’s health has been uncertain. She is now in California with my brother, but I may have to go to her at any time. I always find lecturing tiring, and indulge in it but seldom. At some more fortunate time, however, I assure you I would like to go to Charlottesville and spend an hour with your young men [at the University of Virginia].
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Early in 1929, Cather broke away from her work on Shadows on the Rock to go to her mother in California.
TO GEORGE AND HARRIET FOX WHICHER
New Year’s Day [January 1, 1929]
New York City
Dear Friends:
I meant to go up to the Lord Jeffrey to work for a few weeks soon after the Holidays. But now my mother has had a stroke in California, where she is staying with my bachelor brother [Douglass]. I shall have to go out there now in a few weeks and give up working altogether for the present. I’d made a pleasant start and hate to leave it. If only mother were in San Francisco! But Long Beach, near Los Angeles, is the most hideous and vulgar place in the whole world. Well, this last year was a bad one, and this doesn’t promise much better. But only a part of last year was bad—all the winter in Red Cloud, where your fruit cake found me, was lovely, lovely,—like a winter flower garden, opening more and more–––It was the sort of thing one has to pay for, and pay dear. I suppose I mustn’t squirm now.
Virginia and Tom [Auld] gave me good word of you all at Thanksgiving time, and I send you all the good wishes in the world for 1929. I got a shopful of handkerchiefs last week, and have given them all away but yours and two others—the only one’s I liked. I’m fussy about handkerchiefs.
With love to you all.
Willa Cather
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
[Probably April or May 1929]
Long Beach, California
My Dear Dorothy:
About Christmas time mother had a stroke here where she was spending the winter with my bachelor brother. At that time I was ill with bronchitis in the Grosvenor hotel, New York and could not come. I got away in February and have been here ever since, first hunting a little home with a porch and yard to move mother to, then moving her, then spending days and days shopping for hardware, linen, furniture, dishes, mattresses—everything a home requires. Mother is completely paralyzed on the right side, and speechless. Yet behind the wrenched machinery her mind and strong will, her whole personality
is just the same. She can moan[?] some times—oh so seldom!—we can understand. My sister Elsie has been here from the first. We have excellent nurses, thank God, but a tall, strong woman paralyzed is the most helpless thing in the world. She has to be fed with a spoon like a baby. Constant changes of position give her the only ease she can have. My brother carries her from bed to bed to rest her, and takes her out on the porch in a wheel chair for a couple of hours. Your letter came while I was rubbing her yesterday. I read part of it to her and she remembered you perfectly, and the time she met you at the door. She made me understand that she had seen you much oftener than that once.
This is the most horrible, unreal place in the world, on a dreary curve of the coast, I have rheumatism dreadfully here, and never felt so down-and-out anywhere. My mail is a horror—all the greedy, grasping, intrusive people who want things from writers have never been so merciless. I live at a hotel and taxi-cab out to see mother in the afternoon at the above address. The mornings I spend shopping—the thing that was always the hardest of all things for me to do. Elsie stays at the house to regulate the nurses and the servant.
Oh if only this dreadful thing had happened at home, in a human land, where mother would have had her lovely grandchildren to watch and work[?], where there were dear old friends, kind neighbors, memories, God. There is no God in California, no real life. Hollywood is the flower of all the flowers, the complete expression of it.
I stayed at home two months last spring, after mother came to California, having the old home made more comfortable for her—worked awfully hard, took as much out of me as a book—now she will never see it. Well, there is nothing to write, nothing to say or do, my dear, except to stand until one breaks, and the quicker that happens the better, if only one can break clear in two, and not just half-way. This is why I’ve not written, because I’ve lost my bearings and can’t write except as bitterly and desperately as I feel. Father’s death was swift and gay—he was laughing two hours before he died. Goodbye, God bless you, and don’t remember this letter after you read it. There are enough people crushed under this poor sick woman who defied time so long. Goodbye, dear—nothing to say.
Willa
By late May, the family had moved Virginia Cather to Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena, California.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
[June 1929]
aboard Santa Fe train
Dear Brother;
I am on my way East—will be at the Grosvenor Hotel 35 Fifth Ave. for the next ten days, then go to New Haven, at Hotel Taft. On June 19 I receive a doctorate degree from Yale—the second they have ever given a woman writer. The first was given to Mrs. Wharton eight years ago. She came over from Paris and stayed in New York one week to take it.
I hope you can skip out to see mother for a week this summer, and soon. Better come alone—its bad for her to have several about, she tries even in her feeble state to arrange, direct. I went North when Will Auld was here. Better come now than to her funeral—she will know you now and her mind is still unclouded, though often tired. She is losing ground a little all the time: now up, now down, but on the whole a good deal weaker and lower than when I first came three months ago. She tries, poor dear, but the odds are so terribly against her that I hope it won’t be very long, for her sake. Will Auld felt the same way. She is still herself, and can understand what you say to her. The trip would not be a very long one for you if you came by train. I had a round-trip ticket over this road, or I would have gone back by way of Rawlins. The Sanitarium is a really beautiful place—you could have quiet hours there alone with mother, the nurse in the other room within call. She may live like this a long while—several years, but is almost sure to deteriorate mentally and be less herself. It’s a cruel and pitiful thing, but you’ll be glad to have seen her, as I am. I’m wondering whether I will ever feel much enthusiasm for things again, though. I guess I will—for young people,—and young Art.
I had lovely visits with Jim Yeiser and Marguerite [Richardson] in San Francisco.
Willa
In the fall of 1929, Knopf was preparing to release a special edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop with illustrations by Harold Von Schmidt. Though Cather at first balked at the idea of an illustrated version, she was so pleased with the results that she later asked Knopf if they could print the illustrated version exclusively.
On the outside of the following letter was written:
Dear Miss [Manley] Aaron:
Please get all this to Mr. Stimson, as I have telegraphed him about it.
W.S.C.
TO GEORGE L. STIMSON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
October 17, 1929
Dear Mr. Stimson;
You are a violinist, put the mute on the biography—no the extinguisher! Anything more deadly dull than this jacket text, I can’t imagine. It’s all too foolish, and I really don’t think it’s up to the office to hand out these dull facts. They tell absolutely nothing about the book, or about me, nothing that the public wants to know.
Now, I want you to let me decide on this jacket text. Tell the public something they do want [to] know, something they write me letters about until my hand is fairly crippled with answering them; tell them something about how and why the book was written! That is what they want to know. Instead of this wooden stuff about my grandfathers and Von Schmidt’s (who in thunder cares about our grandfathers?) use this condensation I enclose of my letter to the Commonweal about the book. The English publisher had that letter printed in pamphlet form and gave it wide circulation—wrote me it was singularly effective as advertising. I have cut the article to just about the number of words in the two dreary sketches of Von Schmidt and me now on the jacket.
Please telegraph me that you will use the copy I’m sending you, and not that which is now in the proof of the jacket; and please write me the name of the person who wrote the copy, as I want to talk with her—or him—when I get back to town.
Now as to the copy I send you—very ragged, but I’m lucky to have even that with me.
1. Use quotes before every paragraph
2. When the long cuts occur, please end the paragraphs with asterisks.
3. Please read the proofs yourself and telephone me if you’re in doubt about anything.
Hastily, to catch the mail,
Yours
Willa Cather
Please note the change in the newspaper comment quoted. I beg you to use this one from the New Republic instead of that from the Baltimore Sun.
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
October 17 [1929]
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Dear Blanche;
Unless there is some very important reason why you must see me before you sail, I would like to stay up here about three weeks longer. This poor book has been jumped about so much—all it needs is sitting still. It’s going along smoothly now, and I don’t want to interrupt it just at this point. The working conditions are good, the country lovely, I am out of doors a great deal and feel awfully well—sprint up the mountain with a crowd of boys and don’t get used up. When I go back to New York I shall probably have bronchitis at once! Besides I can’t get my old quiet room at the Grosvenor for several weeks. So I really think I better stay on here for the present. When you come back I hope to be pretty well on my way with this book. It’s no world-beater, but I want it to be good of its kind—very quaint and dry, as I told you; mostly Quebec weather and Quebec legends. But of course the subject matter is a secret between us.
I hope you will have a splendid trip, and that you’ll see the Hambourgs. They’ve both been ill, and I’m very much worried about Isabelle, and I’d like to hear from you how she seems.
Of course as soon as I do get to New York I’ll report at the office.
With love and good wishes for a good journey
Yours
Willa Cather
Please send me Zona Gale’s new book [Borgia], and a book on Greek Domestic Life, or Greek Family Life in the time of the early church, that
you published long ago. I remember an excellent sketch of the Empress Theodora in it, but have forgotten the title [probably The Byzantine Achievement, by Robert Byron].
W. S. C.
Yale French professor Albert G. Feuillerat apparently wrote Cather with questions as part of his work on an article about her books. On May 16, 1930, he published “Romancières américaines: Miss Willa Cather” in Figaro.
TO ALBERT G. FEUILLERAT
November 6, 1929
My dear Mr. Feuillerat:
I am sending you a pamphlet which my publisher sends to colleges and clubs that write to him for information about my books. At the back of this pamphlet there is a list of books which give such information, and I have marked the two which I think might be most helpful to you. The book “Spokesmen” by Professor [T. K.] Whipple, contains the latest and most comprehensive study of my books. The biographical sketch at the beginning of this pamphlet will answer one of your questions at least.
Your inquiry regarding a possible French influence is hard to answer. I began to read French when I was fifteen or sixteen, and for a great many years enjoyed the French prose writers from Victor Hugo down to [Guy de] Maupassant much more than I did English writers of the same periods. I never cared so much for French poetry as for English poetry; but almost any French prose seemed to me a little better than English prose, quite apart from the quality of the writer. Before I was twenty I had read all of the novels of Balzac a good many times. Now I do not read him very often. I don’t think I ever longed to “imitate” one French writer more than another, but in all the great French writers I have felt a greater freedom than in English writers of the same period; they experimented more often and had a wider range of variety—usually seemed a little more direct and sincere. About nearly all the fine old English novelists (before Thomas Hardy) there is a curiously professional tone toward the reader, a joviality a good deal like that of the landlord welcoming guests at an inn. When I was much younger this tone irritated me, I remember. I do not mind it so much now; it seems a manner like other manners, but perhaps the absence of this conventional geniality in French novelists pleased me, beside their range of interest was so much wider—their theme was not always the same story of how some one got settled in life.