by Willa Cather
Edith is in Boston for a week, or she would probably be writing you at the same time. She read Lorenzo through before she left.
I’ll be leaving for California in a few weeks, to join my mother. Her condition is about the same. The doctors tell me it may go on five or six years like this. She seems to get pleasure out of being with us, even in such a wretchedly helpless state. I have to stop off in San Francisco, so I’ll probably go over the northern route. But my next long trip will be to Mexico City. I’m envious that you’ve beat me to it.
With heartiest congratulations
Willa Cather
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
February 19 [1931]
The Parkside, New York City
My dearest mother:
Just a word to you from this hotel where I am waiting for Mary Virginia to come to dinner with me. Thank Douglass for his reassuring telegrams. Indeed I will get to you just as soon as possible—that will be very soon now.
My book is done! My publisher went to Paris soon after Christmas when the book was only about two thirds done. We rushed copies of the manuscript on to him some weeks ago, and he read it in Paris and sent me this cable for a Valentine. Everyone at the office likes it better than “The Archbishop.” I do not like it better, but I think it as good a piece of work.
I am now reading the proofs—Douglass will explain to you what that means, and I am correcting many mistakes—some are the fault of the printers, and some are my own fault. It is so easy to make a little slip in a book so full of dates and historical happenings. One simply has to get them right.
But it won’t be long now until you get a telegram telling you by what train I am coming. I expect to leave New York on the fourth of March, and will go straight through, stopping one night in Chicago to rest.
Here comes M.V. so goodbye with much love from us both
[Unsigned]
TO JOSEPHINE GOLDMARK
March 3, 1931
My dear Miss Goldmark:
I had so counted upon having a long evening’s talk with you about your book [Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America], but the serious illness of two of my friends has cut my winter all to pieces, and now I am hurrying off to California because my mother’s condition has changed for the worse.
It is very difficult to tell you in a letter about the things which delighted me in your book—not this chapter or that, but the whole thing, moving along with such a refreshing calm and such an absence of that nervous tendency to force things up. I read it slowly evening after evening, and it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people who have become one’s friends by the time one reaches port. I enjoyed the Brandeis family as much as the Goldmarks, and Frederika is surely charming enough to give a perfume to any book. What a charm and distinction there is about the personality of your mother as she appears in this book—I wish I could have met her. I am so interested in the daguerreotype picture of her—I think your sister Pauline looks very much like her.
You see, I have known a great many of those German and Bohemian families myself, in the West, three generations of them living together in little towns. I have watched the original pioneers growing old and the third generation growing up, all getting rooted into the soil and interweaving and becoming a part of the very ground. I began to watch it as a young child—it delighted me even then, and keeping in touch with those communities and watching the slow flowering of life has been one of my greatest pleasures. Your book brought it all back to me; the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiments and allied blood. These many characters influencing each other by chance give a book a greater unity than any plan you could have made. As I have already said, reading it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people whom one likes so well that one is sorry to come into port. They have everything that was nicest about the old world and the old time, and I put your book down with a sense that even if I do not like the present very well, we have had a beautiful past.
With very deep gratitude for the happy evenings I spent with your Pilgrims of ’48, for the memories they awoke and for the hope they give me for the future, I am
Your very true friend,
Willa Cather
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ
[March 12, 1931]
Santa Fe California Limited
Crossing Kansas
Dearest Irene;
This morning I wakened wondering if you were awake—I had been dreaming that you and I were on the Burlington, going out to the Golden Wedding together! At first I felt sad—then very happy. I did not really deserve that happy time. I had never been a very thoughtful daughter. My mind and heart were always too full of my one all-absorbing passion. I took my parents for granted. But, deserving or not, I had it, and there is no one in the round world whom I would have chosen before you to share it with me. You were just the right one, and I shall always be thankful for that trip we had together back to our own little town. I’m glad nobody met us at Hastings. I remember every mile of the way home, don’t you? And the bitter cold in which we left Chicago? You see you are the only person who reaches back into the very beginning who has kept on being a part of my life in the world where, for some reason I have to go on and on, from one change to another. The other friends, Isabelle and Edith and Mr. McClure and many others, don’t go so far back. And the dear Red Cloud friends (Carrie and Mary dearest of all) have not been so much in my later life as you have. With you I can speak both my languages; you know the names of all the people dear to me in childhood, and the names of most of those who have grown into my life as I go along. I suppose that is why I crowd so much information about the MENUHINS and the new friends on you. I want somebody from Sandy Point to go along with me to the end. My brothers are loyal and kind but they are not interested in these things. I feel so grateful to you for having kept your interest. Carrie and Mary are so loyal to our old ideals, but they have not been in my later life so much as you, geography, long distances have been against us. I am always so glad Mary and Doctor [E. A. Creighton] were in New York that winter, and of course came to tea and met my friends.
When I go back to Red Cloud to stay for a few months sometime, you must come; Mr. Weisz must surely spare you to me for a little while.
So lovingly
Willie
This train jumps about so—I’m afraid you won’t be able to read this scrawl at all.
TO ELSIE CATHER
March 17 [1931]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
Dear Sister;
I won’t write you a letter until I return from San Francisco and am more settled in mind. Mother has failed so much since I last saw her, but she does have some hours of restful quiet each day, I think. She is not in pain—just the weariness and discomfort of every physical act growing harder and harder. Sometimes she is quite cheerful for an hour, and she goes out in her chair every day and wants to go.
I am going up to San Francisco to take a Doctor of Laws at Berkeley, and devoutly hope that someone here will move out of a cottage while I am away. I am in the main building, next the dining room, and don’t get much rest.
I don’t think you could help much if you were here, dear. Mother is conscious, but her perceptions are so dim—with occasional hours when she seems to understand.
Mrs. Bates is so good to her, and so consciencious, and Douglass I think does more for her than any man ever did for any woman since the world began.
With love
Willa
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
April 2 [1931]
Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, California
Dear Alfred;
I’ve written Mr. Levinson that I cannot speak for him. I’d never get away from here without making a lecture tour if I did!
I agree with you that a type jacket with distinction and style would be best, and I shall be very honored if you see fit to add to it any words over your signatur
e.
Yehudi’s arrival was splendid; it brought all the clans together, as it were. Do you know the Ehrmans and the Helmans? They are the most enchanting people. Sidney Ehrman started Yehudi, long ago (five years, to be accurate!) and they are, through the Jacobys, distantly related to a Mrs. Charles Wiener who lives here now, and who started me on my road in Red Cloud Nebraska, when I was ten years old. I suppose I got a kind of Hebrew complex at that age, and the grand Jews still seem to me the most magnificent people on earth. They simply get me, I’m theirs, I can’t refuse anything.
Hastily
W.S.C.
TO GEORGE L. STIMSON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
April 18, 1931
Pasadena, California
Dear Mr. Stimson;
A Catholic attorney [Garret McEnerney], the most celebrated lawyer on this coast, has found some bothersome “errors in Catholicism” in our page proofs. I can get out of them with safety, but it will hold the works up a couple of weeks, and will mean another set of proofs for Miss Lewis to go over after the corrections are made. I feel awfully apologetic to all the office, and especially to you.
To call a Bishop an Archbishop is unpardonable carelessness—but the french sources I read, of course use the same word, Monsiegneur, for both Bishop and Archbishop. And who on earth (but a Catholic) could guess that until about 1900 it was not permitted to say a mass for individual souls on All Souls’ day! One could only have masses for the dead in general, it seems.
With this book I bid adieu to Rome—otherwise you and Alfred Knopf would have to become converts in order to keep me out of trouble.
I’m terribly sorry to make you all so much trouble, and I do feel rather an idiot. However, thank God for the San Francisco lawyer who will at least have enabled me to conceal my blunders from the Catholic world in general.
Faithfully
W.S.C.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
May 2 [1931]
Las Encinas Sanitarium, Pasadena, California
Dear Roscoe;
Last summer in Paris I had a travelling case made exactly like Jan Hambourg’s. The Knopfs gave me a very handsome one for Christmas, and as this one I got is really a man’s case, and I have never used it, I am sending it to you. You may find it convenient for the many trips you take about the state. It has my initials on, but you can have those changed. My initials seem to be familiar ones now-a-days. An initialed cigarette case which I had used was lately sold for twenty-five dollars at a Catholic church fair. And for so many years my cigarette case was a family skeleton! Well, all things come to him who waits.
Did you see the ballad in the May Atlantic Monthly [Cather’s poem “Poor Marty”]? It’s said to be very good. Mother is well these days, but I got chilled after a hot walk and have had a tummy-ache for three days, like a colic[k]y baby!
With love to you all
Willie
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Sunday [June 14?,1931]
New York City
Dear Dorothy;
I got back a few days ago and go down to Princeton tonight for another of those degrees you are always joking me about. (How avoid ’em is the question? By sailing in May—but I can’t sail every year.) Your letter reached me last night and makes me very happy. About this book I have no feeling at all—except the kind of gratitude you feel toward an old fur coat that has kept you warm through a long cold Atlantic crossing. It has been like a little tapestry tent that I could unfold in hotels and sanitariums and strange places and forget the bleakness about me. Quebec always gives me that sense of loyalty, of being faithful to something.
To recapture that feeling, and to get the sense of the North, was all I tried for. Every little detail of the way they lived is from some old book or letter. The search for all those little things helped me to hold my life together. How much it can mean to people who don’t know the history of the period at all, I don’t know. Jacques is the little nephew [Charles E. Cather] I love the best. I had him all that beautiful winter before Father died—he was only five (5) then. I stopped in Nebraska to see him for a day last week. He’s just the same—remembers everything we did together. “I guess I liked when you used to pull me up the hill on my sled the best of all,” he said softly. Such a faithful, loving little heart! Those late afternoon sled-rides were dear to me, too.
I’ll be here for about 12 days (business matters) then Grand Manan!
Lovingly
Willa
TO PAVELKA BOYS, POSSIBLY EDWARD AND EMIL PAVELKA
June 26, 1931
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Boys:
I expect you think I have forgotten all about you and your Commencement, but you are quite mistaken. I was delighted to get your pictures and have shown them to many of my friends in Pasadena and New York, telling them “That is the kind of fine Bohemian boys we have in Nebraska”. It grieves me to think that Annie [Pavelka] hasn’t any little boys any more, but I am very proud of all the big boys. My brother-in-law, Mr. [James William] Auld of Red Cloud, was here yesterday and he said he had seen one of you at some fair or athletic show not long ago, and that he was well pleased with you.
One reason you have not heard from me is that I have been graduating myself! I hurried on East to take a degree at Princeton and I had a very exciting time. At the President’s dinner Colonel Lindbergh took me out to dinner and sat at my right, and the next day I lunched with him and Mrs. Lindbergh. I met a great many fine people, and they treated me well, I assure you.
It made me very sad to hurry through Nebraska and not see any of you, but I am coming to see you all before another year goes by. I promise myself that, every time I feel blue. You see, it is only the fact that my mother has been so ill and helpless in California that has kept me away from Nebraska. All the time I have for visiting must go to her.
With love to you both and a great deal of love to your mother and Elizabeth [Pavelka] and all your brothers, I am always
Faithfully your friend,
Willa Cather
TO FRANCIS TALBOT, S.J.
June 26, 1931
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
My dear Father Talbot:
I don’t think my book could have given you much more pleasure than your gracious letter of approval gives me. If you have been studying the early history of Quebec, you well know how contradictory their own histories are, and how difficult it is to come at a fair estimate of some of the men who are prominent in that period. I have been going to Quebec for many years and the thing that I always feel there, the thing that I admire, is a certain loyalty to language and religion and tradition. Some of those qualities are essentially French; but in Quebec they seem more moving and rather more noble than in France itself. Quebec seems to me more like a period than a place—like something cut off from France of 200 years ago, which, in some respects, was certainly finer than the France of today or America of today. I feel that the Rock still stands there, though so many generations have come and gone and cast their shadows in the sunlight for a little while.
There are some intentional inaccuracies; the King’s warehouse, at that time, was at the mouth of the River Charles—it was not until some years later that it was placed where I put it in my story. But in all the larger matters I tried to be as accurate as I could.
Thanking you most cordially for your very heartening encouragement, I am
Most sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
PS: I think I ought to tell you that I made some rather grave errors in Catholic practice in the original manuscript (such as having Mass said for an individual soul on All Souls Day) and that these errors were corrected by an extremely intelligent and brilliant Catholic woman, Mrs. Garret McEnerney, the wife of the celebrated San Francisco lawyer.
TO ZOË AKINS
[June 21, 1931]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dearest Zoë
Princeton went off with a bang! I had Lindbergh for m
y dinner partner at the President’s dinner, and lunched with him and Mrs. Lindberg[h] next day. All her photographs to the contrary, she is fascinating!
Lovingly
Willa
TO BLANCHE KNOPF
July 10 [1931]
Dear Blanche;
I’m still busy settling the house and drying all the linens and bedding in the sun. The little house sits on the very edge of the cliff, and the sea fogs come in just as they do into a boat. Besides, the place was not opened up at all last summer, so rust and mould got a good start. We’ll be spick and span in a few days.
Please ask Alfred not to telegraph me the results of his correspondence with his London agent regarding “Shadows”. No telegraph station on the island; all telegrams telephoned out under the Bay, and I have to go two miles to the nearest telephone to receive messages. I can easily reply to a letter by telegram, however.