by Willa Cather
Blanche, please get Charles the grocer to send me two cans of Italian Tomato Paste, two heads of garlic, and a pound of wild rice. It’s the only shop that carries wild rice. Oh yes! please send me half-a-dozen small jars of Caviar (the 65¢ size keep best) ask Charles’ salesman to under-value these things about half in his declaration, as the duty on food stuffs is now from fifty to eighty-five percent.
This is an interesting letter, surely! But I’ll do better later.
With love
Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock, Cather’s ninth novel, was published in August of 1931.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
July 31 [1931]
Grand Manan Island
My Dear Alfred;
Because of the varying schedule of the one boat which is our only mail carrier, I got your letters of the 24th and 27th on the same day!
First, regarding the Heinemann situation [concerning negotiations for a collected edition in England]. I don’t think their attitude very cordial or very promising, since they refuse to bind themselves to anything at all. I have made up my mind to let you go ahead with Cassell. I will have to write a letter to Evans, of course, and I will send you a copy of it. Meanwhile you may cable Salzberg to go ahead with Cassell, so far as I am concerned.
The news you write me about the initial distribution of the new book is delightful, and is a great surprise to me. I still see in that book only a story to please the quiet and meditative few. As it has got beyond that circle, I can only conclude that you and Blanche, and your office, and the “Archbishop” of four years ago, all had a good deal to do with bringing this bashful volume out before the curtain. I think the review in the Atlantic will make up the minds of a great many people who think they are intelligent, but unguided would probably have passed this book over as a dull one.
I have just finished the longest of the three stories I mean for the next volume, and have sent it down to my secretary to be typed. It will run about 23,000 words. We had spoken of “Obscure Destinies” as a title for that volume of three stories. Would you like “Out West” better? They are all western stories; one in Colorado, one in Kansas, one in Nebraska.
Tell Blanche the things from Charles came when much needed—especially the garlic and tomato paste, which you can’t get in Protestant Canada; and yesterday [I] made a risotto that would make your mouth water. I can still get excellent champagne in St. John, Pol Roger 1919, that excellent year, which I couldn’t get in Paris at all, nor anywhere but at Aix-les-Bains. This island is always beautiful, and the weather has been so wild and dramatic that I cannot stay at a desk very long. The climate is everything else in God’s world,—but is never hot or sticky.
My love to you both, and my very deep gratitude to you and all your staff for the splendid way they have stood behind this book. It gives me a lighter heart for the books to come.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO MARY VIRGINIA BOAK CATHER
August 10 [1931]
My Dearest Mother;
The weather has been all sun and blue sea for the last week, and I have been taking some splendid long walks along the high cliffs where there are no houses for many miles and one never meets a soul. The islanders keep that stretch wild to pasture their cows in. Next week I won’t have time to walk much, for hundreds of letters have been pouring in about my new book. My secretary in New York answers most of them, but there are many from old friends and important people that I must answer myself—enough to keep me very busy all next week.
I’m sorry that horrible picture of me got onto the front page of the magazine called “Time”, but I couldn’t help it. One just has to grin and bear such things. If I mourned about accidents like that, and about the things jealous, disappointed newspaper men write about me, I could just mourn my life away—which I don’t intend to do. When the “Archbishop” first came out, all the reviews were unfavorable and many of them savage. Now those same newspapers call it a ‘classic’.
My dearest love to Elsie, and I will write her as soon as I get caught up with my mail.
With my dearest love,
Willie
Dear Elsie and Douglass; please be sure to read the sketch and review in the Atlantic Monthly. It is in the “Atlantic Bookshelf”, in the front advertising pages.
The August 1931 Atlantic Monthly published a glowing review of Shadows on the Rock by Ethel Wallace Hawkins. A review by Wilbur Cross, a former Yale English professor who became governor of Connecticut in 1930, was published in the Saturday Review of Literature, which later published, with permission, the following letter that Cather wrote to Cross in response.
TO WILBUR CROSS
August 25 [1931]
Grand Manan Island
Dear Governor Cross;
I want to thank you most heartily for the first understanding review I have seen of my new book. You seem to be the first person who sees what a different kind of method I tried to use from that which I used in the “Archbishop”. I tried, as you say, to state the mood and the view-point in the title. To me the rock of Quebec is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. There another age persists. There, among the country people and the nuns, I caught something new to me; a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but which I could not but admire. It is hard to state that feeling in language; it was more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacoluthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear. I took the incomplete air and tried to give it what would correspond to a sympathetic musical setting; tried to develop it into a prose composition not too conclusive, not too definite; a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced; a kind of thinking, a mental complexion inherited, left over from the past, lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation.
Now it seemed to me that the mood of the mis-fits among the early settlers (and there were a good many) must have been just that. An orderly little French household that went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick their house down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the forests. And, as you seem to recognize, once having adopted a tone so definite, once having taken your seat in the close air by the apothecary’s fire, you can’t explode into military glory, any more than you can pour champagne into a salad dressing. (I don’t believe much in rules, but Stevenson laid down a good one when he said: you can’t mix kinds.) And really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and on occasion died for it, as if it really were a sacred fire–––and all this temperately and shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by good sense.
It’s very hard for an American to catch that rhythm–––it’s so unlike us. But I made an honest try, and I got a great deal of pleasure out of it, if nobody else does! And surely you’ll agree with me that our writers experiment too little, and produce their own special brand too readily.
With deep appreciation of the compliment you pay me in taking the time to review the book, and my friendliest regards always.
Faithfully
Willa Cather
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
[September 1931]
Dear Dorothy;
My poor mother died on Monday the 31st. There was no boat out from here until Wednesday, so I could not even try to get to the services, which were held in Red Cloud on Thursday afternoon. My brother and sister left Pasadena with mother’s body Monday night and two other brothers joined them on the way home. For mother’s sake I am glad it is over—before her mind began to fail. The end was sudden—pneumonia. I shall stay on here through September and then I must go to my poor brother who has lived solely for his mother for three years an
d a half. I feel a good deal like a ghost myself, and I know it is much worse for him. Goodbye, I know you’ll be sorry, my dear. It seems strange to me that you and I are now the “older generation.” I never thought of that before.
Lovingly
Willa
In a review of Shadows on the Rock published in the September 1931 Forum, Granville Hicks attacked both it and Death Comes for the Archbishop as “diffuse” and said it revealed why Cather was a “minor” writer. Hicks ended, “To-day, perhaps even more than in the past, it takes stern stuff to make a novelist. Miss Cather, one is forced to conclude, has always been soft; and now she has abandoned herself to her softness.” Henry Goddard Leach was the editor of the Forum.
TO HENRY GODDARD LEACH
September 1 [1931]
Dear Mr. Leach;
The article about which I wrote you is not exactly a review of my new book, but a general estimate of all my books and of me. From the letters I have received about it, I gather that it is accepted as your opinion and the Forum’s opinion; Mr. Hicks is not mentioned. It is probably your policy to give your reviewers a free hand, but there are limits to all editorial policies. When I was editing McClures I would certainly not have allowed an article so generally derogatory to you to appear in the magazine. Had Mr. McClure and I both been abroad, the office staff would not have allowed an article so detrimental to an author for whom we had any regard to be printed, without first consulting us.
Granted that you felt the time had come to utter a few unpleasant truths, it is possible to say uncomplimentary things in a courteous and even a respectful way. But the tone of this article is sarcastic and contemptuous throughout, and no desk editor representing you in your absence would have printed such an article about any writer for whom you had much regard.
The Forum, I realize, has a right to put as low an estimate as you think just upon any writer’s abilities, but I question the editorial ethics of printing a statement like the following [magazine text is literally cut out and pasted on the letter]:
Like most of her books, it is elegiac, beguiling its readers with pictures of a life that has disappeared, and deliberately exploiting the remoteness of that life in order to cast a golden haze about it.
To “deliberately exploit” is certainly to use things or persons rather craftily for one’s own advantage. Those words have a bad history, and their connotation is worse than their literal meaning. You must know that I am not an opportunist or a trickster. If you wished to tell the public a few plain truths about me, you could surely have given the job to someone who was not malicious.
A good many reviewers do not like this book very well. Dr. Cross, who reviewed it for Mr. [Henry Seidel] Canby, is, I gather, somewhat disappointed in it. But he has enough scholarship and literary background to see just what I was trying to do, and he gives me credit for an honest effort even though he wishes I had done something else.
An article in this tone, appearing in a magazine of The Forum’s standing, does one harm, certainly, as it was intended to do. But I think the hurt it gives my feelings, coming from a publication with which I had always had most pleasant and friendly relations, far outweighs any other harm. This is the first letter of protest I have ever written an editor concerning a review, and I am very sad that it is to you I am addressing it.
Sincerely yours
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
September 3 [1931]
Dear Alfred;
With this letter I am sending Miss Aaron two short stories for the volume of which “Neighbor Rosicky” will make a third. I hope that you and Blanche will read them both before Miss Aaron starts out to sell them. “Old Mrs. Harris” is the more interesting, perhaps; but I think “Two Friends” is the best short story I have ever done. It’s a little like a picture by [Gustave] Courbet; has that queer romantic sort of realism. It is so ‘American’ of thirty years ago that when I look it over I quite forget who wrote it. When you do a thing that is so indigenous that the greatest foreign master couldn’t have done it, then, it seems to me, you bring home the bacon, even though it’s but a sketch—a painter’s subject done in a painter’s way.
“Mrs. Harris”, too, is very Western, and it’s much more of a story; but it’s the two “business men” I’m proud of.
I sent you a wire about the jacket for the fourth edition. I don’t want to play the Atlantic article too hard, and as the third edition jacket will be small type and close set, why not have the fourth made up of short extracts with more space? I wish you would send me a proof of that drawing of a black rock you said you might sometime use on a jacket. It rather struck me at the time, and I’d like to see it again.
I suppose that awful Good Housekeeping portrait is good publicity; it’s bringing in a flood of letters from the queerest kind of people, splashy ladies on Park Avenue and farmers’ wives in Minnesota, all equally unable to write an English sentence.
Speaking of reviews, the worst I ever got were for “Antonia”. I got them from a clipping bureau in those days, and read them. And in the whole United States there were just three enthusiastic ones; Fanny Butcher, Grant Overton in the Sun, and some Philadelphia paper. All the others said it wasn’t a good story and it wasn’t good English; it was a mass of notes to be read at a Grange meeting and not a book at all. “A Lost Lady” and “Youth and the Bright Medusa” were the only books that got good reviews. This time it’s only the New York notices that are spiteful (publicity apropos of degrees and such things always antagonizes a lot of journalists). The papers in the chain of cities across the country are all cordial and friendly, even if they don’t like this book as well as others.
With warmest regards to everyone in the office,
Willa Cather
Cather often remembered her reviews, especially of My Ántonia, as having been much worse than they really were.
TO MR. ALEXANDER STUART FRERE-REEVES, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD.
September 9 [1931]
Dear Mr. Frere-Reeves;
During the last four months, because of the illness and death of my mother, I have not attended to business correspondence. I tell you this not as an explanation of my decision regarding the English publication of “Shadows on the Rock”, but in apology for my discourtesy in not replying to your letters.
I have never had any fault to find with my treatment by the house of Heinemann in the past, and I have never bothered the house with letters urging them to push my books in England. I thought if the books were good the sale would in time take care of itself. But it seemed to me that with this book the time had come to push matters a little. I was disappointed in the terms offered by Heinemann, and the very small advance offered, 250 pounds, as against 750 offered by another publisher. That offer seemed to me to express very little confidence in the book.
The thing that most influenced me to let this book try its fortunes with another publisher was the note of irritation and extreme annoyance in Mr. Evans’ letter to Mr. Salzberg. I have never met Mr. Salzberg, but I cannot believe that Alfred Knopf would have a very unreasonable man for his English representative. When there is friction between two publishing houses, it is almost sure to make a certain amount of unpleasantness for the author whose interests depend on the co-operation of the two houses. I am very stupid in business matters, and a business transaction which would be very simple for most people causes me a great deal of worry and indecision. That is why, for years, I have let Alfred Knopf manage my business affairs for me, very largely. He did not, however, attempt to influence me in my decision regarding “Shadows on the Rock”. He merely put the correspondence before me. I felt that I would rather have the book go to a publisher who was eager to do his best with it than leave it with Heinemann, where the advance offer was not encouraging and where there seemed to be some antagonism toward me, or Knopf, or both.
As for a collected edition, if Mr. Evans had said he would attend to it in three years, or four years, that would have been definite en
ough for me, but he was unwilling to set any date.
I have none but the most friendly feelings for Heinemann, and admiration as well. I let this book go elsewhere not because of any dissatisfaction with our relations in the past, but because the terms offered for this particular book indicated that Mr. Evans thought less of its possibilities than I did. Perhaps I made a wrong decision, but, at any rate, I beg you to believe that there is nothing piqued or offended in my attitude, and that my feeling for the house as a great business and a friend to Letters is what it was when I expressed myself fully to you in New York last winter. I did not transfer my books to the Knopf English branch, you will remember, though it would have pleased Alfred, I think. I believed that the time would come when, without interference from me, you would find it advantageous to push my books a little more. With this last book, I thought that time had come. I may, of course, be mistaken. If you are in New York this winter I hope I may have an opportunity to see you.
Very sincerely yours
Willa Cather
P.S. Please excuse the rough form of this letter. I am off on this little island in the Bay of Fundy, without a secretary or typist, and I type very badly.
TO MR. MEROMICHEY
October 5, 1931
My dear Mr. Meromichey:
Thank you for your kind letter. To be quite frank with you, I always shrink a little from the idea of my books being read in schools. At least, I don’t like to feel that they are “assigned” to students as a part of the grind. If young people read me, I would like it to be because they want to—I would even like to be read on the sly. But this is not replying to your question. If one of my books has to be read year after year (as “Ivanhoe” was in the days when I went to school), I think that “Death Comes for the Archbishop” will stand the wear and tear better than the others, and perhaps “One of Ours” or “The Professor’s House” would be more interesting to the young people than any of the others. “The Professor’s House” and Tom Outland’s Story seem to be especially popular with German and Scandinavian school boys.