by Willa Cather
Willa Cather
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
July 1 [1930]
Paris
Dear Mabel:
I’ve been wanting this long while to write you that your article on [D. H.] Lawrence is the only thing I’ve seen which has any of him in it. Everyone else who put in an oar wrote about themselves, as people usually do, but you really wrote about Lawrence, and I got a thrill out of it.
Awfully nice of you to tell me that [Robinson] Jeffers liked the “Archbishop.” “Roan Stallion” is such a glorious poem. I read it in San Francisco and about went to see the man. The short one called “Night” seems to me one of the finest things done in English in many years.
Paris is almost as noisy and crowded as New York. It has changed woefully in seven years. I came only to see a dear friend who has been very ill. Both Edith and I are often homesick for New Mexico, in spite of the many gay things we are doing. I’m darned tired of being gay, to tell the truth. I’d like just to be a vegetable for a few months.
With heartiest love from us both
Willa
Through Jan Hambourg, Cather met the Menuhin family in Paris. The Menuhins—parents Marutha and Moshe, children Yehudi, Hephzibah, and Yaltah—were a gifted musical family who would become some of the most treasured companions of Cather’s later years. Yehudi, considered one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century, began playing publicly at age seven. When Cather met him, he was fourteen years old.
TO MARGARET AND ELIZABETH CATHER
July 14 [1930]
My Dear Twinnies;
Naughty Elizabeth, who has not written to me! Nice Margaret who did! Yesterday I climbed up to the tower of Notre Dame again and spent the morning among my old friends, the gargoyles. The stairway is a circular one of white stone, and winds round and round a central column of white stone. It is very dark, lit only here and there by a slit in walls, and only then can one realize the great strength and thickness of the walls of Notre Dame and the huge blocks of cut stone of which they are built, stone fitted into stone with no cement.
Today is the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille in the Revolution, the greatest holiday of the year, and the people are dancing in the street before every little cafe. Late last night Jan and Isabelle drove us about in a taxi to see the dancers in all the little streets in the poor part of the city. Tonight we are all going to dine together at a gay restaurant—a lovely place where I went to lunch three days ago with Yehudi Menuhin the wonderful boy-violinist from San Francisco, and his family. He has two little sisters aged nine and seven who are almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he. They were in Paris only one day and we had a very exciting [time]. The one aged 7½ last winter wrote me a dear little letter about the “Archbishop”! All three have golden hair and skin like cream and roses—simply fairy-tale children. Their parents are nice, too, especially the mother.
I am enclosing a check for Virginia, to help with her college expenses, and I’m awfully pleased that she got the scholarship.
With my dearest love to you all
Willa Cather
How awful that they translate “Notre Dame de Paris” the Hunchback of Notre Dame!
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
August 21 [1930]
Grand Hôtel d’Aix, Aix-les-Bains, France
My Dear Blanche;
I have been gloriously doing nothing here for three weeks, after very interesting but rather tiring travelling in Provençe. I love Aix, and this year it is not at all crowded. I’ve always thought the cooking and pastry of Savoie the best in France, and, alas, I have picked up a couple pounds! I expect to sail on the Empress of Scotland, September 20, landing at Quebec and going straight down to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to the old hotel where I always work in comfort and quiet. I dont want to go to New York until I have finished the last part of the book. I’ve been too lazy to work over here, and seeing too many old friends. I had two thrilling weeks motoring through the wild coast and mountains about Marseille—I’ve wanted for years to explore it.
The Hambourgs are now in Salzburg, at the Mozart festival, but they will meet me in Paris September 4th.
My love to you and Alfred and best wishes to everyone in the office.
Yours
Willa Cather
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
September 30 [1930]
aboard the Canadian Pacific S. S. Empress of France
My Dearest Dorothy:
Your letter, telling me of your mother’s death, reached me in Paris on the day before I sailed for home. Isabelle and I happened to have been talking of her the night before. I am sorry on your account, but almost glad on your dear mother’s. She was too keen and alert to linger in a clouded state—when she had a good day she must have felt that something had broken or given way, and that would have distressed her. When I last saw her, after her trip ’round the world, she was entirely and vigorously herself, all her colors flying. I thought she had not changed in the least. I am glad I can remember her like that. But these vanishings, that come one after another, have such an impoverishing effect upon those of us who are left—our world suddenly becomes so diminished—the landmarks disappear and all the splendid distances behind us close up. These losses, one after another, make one feel as if one were going on in a play after most of the principal characters are dead.
I have been in France since the middle of May and am now on my way to Quebec. From the middle of October I shall be in Jaffrey N.H. for some weeks and perhaps I can run up to see you some day.
My mother’s condition is unchanged. The doctors tell me she is so strong that she may live for five or six years in this state. Goodbye, dear Dorothy. I’m so sorry that you’ve had this break to face, but oh I’m glad for your mother and for you too that she was not punished by a long and helpless and utterly hopeless illness.
My love to you, from a full heart.
Willa
TO ALFRED AND BLANCHE KNOPF
Sunday [October 5, 1930]
Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City
Dear Blanche and Alfred;
I was so glad to get your message at sea, and your good wishes for me were fully realized. I had a fine crossing, and anything more lovely than the approach to this continent by way of the St. Lawrence, when all the wild forests of its shores and islands are blazing with autumn color, I have never seen. I meant to go on immediately to Boston and Jaffrey, but I got rather a thrill out of journeying straight from Paris to Quebec, and as the weather is glorious I shall stay on here until Tuesday. My story comes to life as soon as I get back here and I get a good deal of pleasure out of playing with it. Books, alas, are like children,—never so much fun after they grow up and are finished as they are when they are merely things to play with and all your own. I’ve learned to get my fun before publication. I’ll write you soon from Jaffrey.
Affectionately
Willa Cather
In 1930, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Cather the William Dean Howells Medal for Death Comes for the Archbishop. The medal is given every five years to honor the best book by an American writer published during the previous half decade. That same year, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon receiving her letter of congratulation, Lewis responded that he thought Cather ought to have been the recipient, and said that he considered A Lost Lady one of the very best books in American literary history.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
November 6 [1930]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Roscoe;
Gold medal very large and handsome—weighs several pounds—gold with no alloy at all—handy for a paperweight. I’m going to take it to [the] bank to have it weighed and valued. It’s one thing you can turn into money—one flattering phrase that’s worth something!
I send you a very good editorial from the N.Y. Times, and I think that is just why Lewis got the Nobel award. We look like that to Europe, and all those Swedish
chore boys we kicked around are telling us what they think of us. I expect we really are like that. Anyhow, I like Lewis and I wrote him that though I couldn’t honestly say I’d rather he got the award than I, I’d rather he had it than anyone else. The newspaper discussed the award so much that thousands of good people think I did get it, and my mail is full of dozens of begging letters from preachers and widows and orphans; “please help me with just a little of that $47,000”!
I send you a copy of Judge [Robert] Grant’s speech made in conferring the medal. You might send it and the newspaper clippings to Elsie. She might be interested to see them and I have over two hundred letters to dictate before I can begin to work, or even have my tooth filled, so I’ve not much time for family correspondence.
Mr. [George] Whicher of Amherst was to bring Virginia and Tom up to dine with me in Jaffrey on the first Sunday in December, but this medal affair called me away before my appointed time, and now I won’t get back. I’m going to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving, to some old friends who will give me some dinner and a bedroom and study—and let me alone.
With much love to you and yours
Willie
Send the checks to me at this address, please
At the ceremony where she received her Howells medal, Cather met the American sculptor and writer Lorado Taft.
TO LORADO TAFT
November 17, 1930
New York City
My dear Mr. Taft:
As I had to leave the platform before the exercises were over last Friday, in order to catch a train, I did not have an opportunity for a short conversation with you. Though I was alone with you for a few moments before the program began, you were then occupied with the address you were soon to deliver. I simply wanted to tell you how much pleasure your fountain near the Art Institute in Chicago has given me for many years. I have to go West two or three times every year and I never go through Chicago, even when the interval between trains in short, without taking a cab and driving over to the Art Institute for another glimpse at that fountain. It always delights me. There is in it everything that I feel about the Great Lakes, and it always puts me in a hopeful, holiday mood. I do not know whether you yourself think it an especially fine thing, but I do. I do not know why I like it so much, because I know very little about sculpture. But it seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO READ BAIN
January 14, 1931
My dear Mr. Bain:
Yes, of course I get a great many “fan” letters as you call them—but most of them are pretty thin wind, I assure you. It is very easy to pick out the real ones. Of course, as you intimate, it is a very distinct disadvantage to be a Lady Author—anybody who says it isn’t, is foolish. Virginia Woolf makes a pretty fair statement of the disadvantages [in A Room of One’s Own]. But young children are neither very male nor very female, and I find that the impressions and memories that hang on from those early days of having no particular sex, are the safest ones to trust to—and the pleasantest ones to play with. I am glad you liked the two particular books you mention—but myself I always feel that “A Lost Lady” is, artistically, more successful than either of them.
Cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO NORMAN FOERSTER
January 14, 1931
Dear Norman Foerster:
No, I cannot accept your kind invitation. I simply never give lectures or talks of the kind you suggest. I used to, very occasionally, but since my mother has been an invalid I have had no time for these things.
I have not written you before because I have wanted to write you a long letter about your book [Toward Standards: A Study of the Present Critical Movement in American Letters], and Heaven only knows when I will have time to do so. I am just finishing a new book of my own and will soon go to my mother in California. I read your book very carefully and with great interest. I am awfully glad you wrote it, and I agree with you in the main—in your opinions on the history of criticism and the critical mind, but I do feel that you take a little group of American critics, I might say of New York critics, too seriously. This of course is entirely confidential, but I think of the men you mention, Randolph Bourne and, in a less degree, [Henry Seidel] Canby, were the only ones who had that instantaneous perception and absolute conviction about quality which a good critic must have. You understand me; it is a thing like an ear for music. You can tell when a singer flats, or you cannot tell. You cannot be taught to distinguish that error.
Take, for example, an intelligent and serious man like Stuart Sherman. (And please don’t think there is anything personal in this—he always treated me very generously indeed.) I knew him quite well. He was absolutely lacking in the quality I speak of. He could take a writer as a subject; talk about him and read about him and worry his brain over the matter, and say a great many interesting things about this writer—many of them true. But it was all from the outside. It was a thing worked up, studied out.
What I mean is this: suppose that Sherman had read all the novels of Joseph Conrad except the “Nigger of the Narcissus”, that he had written about them and read what other critics had to say about them until he knew a great deal about these books and their quality. If all this were true, and I had taken a dozen pages from the “Nigger of the Narcissus” and mixed them up with a dozen pages written by Conrad’s fairly intelligent imitators (people like Francis Brett Young for example), it would have been utterly impossible for Stuart Sherman to pick out the Conrad pages from the second rate stuff.
A fine critic must have something more than a studious nature and high ideals, and the very best criticism I happen to know was not written by professional critics at all. Henry James was a very fine critic I think; and so was Walter Pater. And so was Prosper Mérimée (Do you know his essay on Gogol? That’s what I call criticism!).
I don’t mean that all fine artists in prose have been good critics. Of course Turgenev was a very poor critic.
But on the whole, composers are the best judges of new musical compositions and writers are the best judges of new kinds of writing. I mean they are better judges than either musical scholars or literary scholars. But this is only a little of a great deal that I would like to say to you about your book, which does exactly what a book of that sort ought to do—makes me want to come back at you and have it out with you, both where I agree and where I disagree.
Always cordially yours,
Willa Cather
January 20
P.S. This letter was written some days ago—but my secretary [Sarah Bloom] begged me not to send it. “Just the sort of indiscreet letter that falls into the wrong hands and makes you a lot of enemies for nothing,” says she. However, as she has gone to Cuba for her vacation, I think I’ll send it anyhow. I feel that it won’t fall into the wrong hands, and that you won’t quote me—even to your publisher, who is rather a chatter-box.
Yours,
Willa Cather
TO MRS. FRANK L. GRIPPEN
January 14, 1931
The Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Mrs. Grippen:
Excuse delay in replying to your letter. I have been travelling. I think I can enlighten your perplexity. Myra Henshaw [in My Mortal Enemy] before her death came to consider Oswald as her “mortal enemy”;—she came to believe that anything loved selfishly and fiercely and extravagantly became the enemy of one’s soul’s peace. Please tell your ladies that that simple fact is the subject of the story.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Knopf published Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of D. H. Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos, in 1932. Cather read the book before it was published, the same way she read Luhan’s personal memoir, Intimate Memories.
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
January 17 [1931]
35 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Dear Mabel;
I simply love the way you do the Taos country and the weather. When I was writing about it in a very formal and severe manner, as befits the eye of a priest and the pen of a stranger, I kept thinking that I would love to see it done intimately, as part and parcel of somebody’s personal life—not a background! (about once a week I get a letter from some puppy who tells me he has done a story of sophisticated easterners in a New Mexican background, or some other kind of simper with a New Mexican background.) I wish to God I could have put the Archbishop in Kansas or Nebraska—not many sensitive artistic natures have the grit to follow you there. It’s a great advantage to work in a part of the country that is distinctly déclassé—it rids you [of] superficial writers and superficial readers. But this is a long departure. When a country like the Taos country is really a part of your life, and when your life is a form of living and not a little camera,—well, then it all works up very stunningly together. Few things have ever given me more joy than the night you all spent chasing about in [the] alfalfa field. Why Tony’s car becomes a positive god of vengeance, a frightful threat to the foolishness of all of you, and to a whole school of thinking that has upset the old balance of things, where personal desires and emotions were masked under a National consciousness or a tribe will, or the particular false-front of any ones social period.