by Willa Cather
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
TO FANNY BUTCHER
October 14 [1931]
New York City
I was so glad to get your card from Aix-les-Bains. I was up on my Canadian island and glad of everything this summer, until my mother died suddenly in Pasadena, August 31st. Since then life has been a tough pull. A long illness does not prepare one for the end of it.
I’m just back in New York for a few weeks, and one thing you can do for me; which is to send me six copies of your review of my book, which certainly gave me a hand‑up when I needed it—made me feel that I had been able to transfer to you the unreasonable and unaccountable glow that all those little details of life in Quebec gave to me. It’s like a child’s feeling about Christmas—no reason for it, it merely happens to one.
Of course most of the reviewers have cursed and scorned me for what I didn’t write! No ‘drama’, nothing about Indian fights! As if one didn’t have a perfect right to love a cream pitcher (of the early Georgian period) better than the Empire State Building. As if one could choose what one would love, anyway, or how one should love it.–––But, as I told you, I did this one to keep me going, and I’m well satisfied if a few old friends like yourself get a little happiness out of it, as I did. I’m just back yesterday—haven’t seen Alfred Knopf yet, but he telephoned yesterday that it keeps on selling like anything, 92,000 actual shipments from the office, besides the two Book Clubs. I think that’s because he himself liked it, and he and all his staff have worked awfully hard for it. I am so glad you liked it. You’re so much like Miss Roullier [?] that I almost feel as if you were French.
Affectionately
Willa Cather
Despite harsh reviews by some of the younger critics—such as Granville Hicks—Shadows on the Rock was a top-selling novel, second only to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth in 1931.
TO READ BAIN
October 22, 1931
My dear Mr. Bain:
I have just returned to New York for a few days and your kind letter has been brought to my attention. This, I think, is the second time you have written me, and if we are going to be correspondents, I must beg you to either drop my middle name or spell it correctly. It is not Siebert, but Sibert. (I haven’t used it myself for years.)
Yes, of course, most of the reviewers are indignant because I did not write a conventional historical novel with all the great characters up and doing, and behaving themselves in the traditional manner. This does not bother me in the least, and if it bothers the reviewers, I only wish they would write the kind of book they like about old Quebec. It is a subject open to all—has been standing there for three hundred years.
No, I am not a Catholic, and I do not think I shall become one. On the other hand, I do not regard the Roman Church merely as “artistic material”. If the external form and ceremonial of that Church happens to be more beautiful than that of other churches, it certainly corresponds to some beautiful vision within. It is sacred, if for no other reason than that is the faith that has been most loved by human creatures, and loved over the greatest stretch of centuries.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
While Shadows on the Rock was selling, Cather was thinking about her next book, Obscure Destinies, a collection of three stories. One of those stories, “Old Mrs. Harris,” was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal under the title “Three Women”; it appeared there serially starting with the September 1932 issue. The following letter seems to be a transcription made by Knopf staff.
TO MANLEY AARON, ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
October 27, 1931
My dear Miss Aaron,
I notice that in his very cordial letter Mr. [George Horace] Lorimer speaks of the story they have just bought for the Journal as “Old Miz Harris.” Please call his attention to the fact that this is a very small variation from my text but it is an important one. In the first place it sounds as though the story were a Southern dialect story, which it isn’t. In the second place it gives to anyone acquainted with the South a very wrong impression of the old lady’s social status. Poor mountain people would certainly call her “Miz” but her neighbors and people of her own station would always call her “Mrs.” and that is the designation of her respectable middle class position.
I hope of course, that the editors will be careful to see that there is no change in the text anywhere without my consent.
Yours sincerely,
[No signature present]
M. A. DeWolfe Howe, author and editor of Memories of a Hostess, wrote Cather in October of 1931 to ask if she might reconsider her earlier suggestion that he destroy the letters she wrote to Annie Adams Fields. The Fields materials in Howe’s possession were now to be obtained by the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, and he thought Cather might want to reconsider her previous position.
TO M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
November 11, 1931
My dear Mr. Howe:
Yes indeed, I beg you to destroy all my letters before you dispose of Mrs. Fields’ correspondence. There are very special reasons why I wish this to be done.
In the first place, those letters are entirely artificial and unrepresentative of me. Your feeling that they might be of some guidance to a future biographer is mistaken; they would only mislead him. Mrs. Fields was so new a type in my experience that I was never at ease in writing to her. I was always afraid of touching upon one of her prejudices, or in some way letting the noisy, modern world in upon her. So I always tried to write her long sentences that meant nothing. I remember perfectly well how I used to struggle to fill out a few pages and say nothing at all.
Of course, when I was with Mrs. Fields herself, I never felt any constraint; in fact, there were few people with whom one could be so unguarded. That was because she was the soloist and I the accompanist. How delightful it was to have her look up from the morning paper and ask gravely: “My dear, who is this Rex Beach, has he to do with letters?”
But there was none of this genuineness and spontaneous pleasure in my letters to Mrs. Fields. They were written from a sense of duty—just because she enjoyed opening the morning mail. So if you will just put them in the furnace, I shall be greatly obliged to you.
Always faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. It has just occurred to me that the most satisfactory arrangement would be to ask you to send the letters in question to me, at the Grosvenor Hotel, 35 Fifth Avenue, New York, where I shall be stopping for a week or ten days. I will glance at them, and if there are any that seem to be more than mere formal evasion, I will return them to you for your collection.
Though it is unknown how many letters Howe had, he did send them to Cather to look over, and four letters from Cather to Fields are now found in the collections of the Huntington Library.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
November 26 [1931]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
I’d be very pleased if you did get out a new edition [of Song of the Lark], with a new jacket minus the Breton picture. I’m just leaving for a family reunion in Red Cloud, and could not possibly write a preface now. I’ve thought a good deal about prefaces, Knopf suggested one for a certain book of his, and I’ve decided not to write any more prefaces at all. They stimulate a temporary interest and curiosity, but in the long run they are a mistake, for an author still living and still working. I shall leave various comments on some of my books, out of which you can make prefaces after my decease.
If the writers of various novels I like had written prefaces to them, it would rather spoil the books for me. I think even stupid people like to puzzle over a book. A slight element of mystery is a great asset. The explanation of the “Archbishop” which I wrote for The Commonweal has been much used and quoted; but it would be a great mistake to use it as a preface to the book. It is too much like selling my own goods. One has to follow one’s instinct in these matters, for that is the only guide one has.
I know you will not misunderstand my refusal. I don’t mean to be disobliging, and I am glad to help my publishers in any way that seems to me the right way for me. I am sure, for instance, that the article I wrote for the Colophon [“My First Novels (There Were Two),” published in June 1931], which has been so much quoted, stimulated interest in “O Pioneers” and “Antonia”. Indirect methods are the best, I am sure.
I have not a copy of “The Song of the Lark” at hand, but I think of one change I beg you to make. Leave the dedication to Isabelle McClung, but please cut out the limping verse which follows it,—an idiotic attempt to immitate the metre of Walther’s ‘Prize Song’ [from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg].
Yes, the new book is doing wonderfully well. I really think the feeling in Knopf’s office had a lot to do with it. They were all keener about it than about any other book of mine, even the salesmen. Mr. Stimson thought better of it than I did, a good deal. I turned in the first two-thirds of the manuscript to him when the Knopfs were abroad. I was feeling rather low about it, and he gave me a tremendous hand-up. I could see at once that it was personal, not publishing, enthusiasm. He and his staff did a lot for it.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
PART NINE
A Troubled Time
1932–1936
It’s a brutal fact, Zoe, that after one is 45, it simply rains death, all about one, and after you’ve passed fifty, the storm grows fiercer. I never open the morning paper without seeing the death of someone I used to know, East or West, staring me in the face. And in the days when I first knew you, people didn’t use to die at all; the obituary page never had the slightest connection with our personal life. Death just becomes a deep, be-numbing fact in one’s life long before it ends one.
—WILLA CATHER TO ZOË AKINS, November 21, 1932
Willa Cather in 1936. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (photo credit 9.1)
IN 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, a group of three stories set in the west—“Neighbor Rosicky,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Two Friends”—that are among her best-loved fiction. “Old Mrs. Harris” is highly autobiographical, featuring a family much like the Cathers in a town much like Red Cloud, Nebraska. It is a deeply moving story that could only be published after the death of Cather’s mother, for the character inspired by Virginia Boak Cather, Victoria Templeton, is complex and not altogether attractive. Three years later, in 1935, Cather published her eleventh novel, Lucy Gayheart, about a young musician from the West. She described the book as “modern, western, very romantic, non-Catholic.” The central character of Lucy Gayheart is in many ways a darker counterpoint to the triumphant Thea Kronborg of Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark. In 1936, her first book of nonfiction prose appeared, a collection of essays titled Not Under Forty. The preface to that volume, which claimed that the book was “for the backward, and by one of their number,” signaled Cather’s growing sense of emotional and intellectual isolation from the contemporary world. And yet she felt such isolation while also living as one of the most famous and celebrated authors of the day, one who attracted many fan letters and inquiries from people around the world.
In February of 1932, Ferris Greenslet wrote Cather trying to convince her to sell the motion picture rights to The Song of the Lark. He thought she might get as much as $15,000 to $25,000. He pointed out very politely that Houghton Mifflin was contractually able to sell the rights to the novel without her approval should they wish to.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
March 13 [1932]
Dear Mr. Greenslet;
If you can get a very high price for the film rights of “The Song of the Lark” I’ll consent to the sale. But I wish you would send me a letter, signed by several members of the firm, assuring me that you will never ask me to consider a film proposition for “Antonia”. I would like to feel entirely safe where that book is concerned. You can do this for me, can’t you?
I don’t for a minute believe that a film production would do more than give the sale of the book a temporary punch. The production of “A Lost Lady” brought in hundreds of letters from illiterate and sloppy people, which gave me a low opinion of “movie” audiences.
I notice that you are advertising the new edition very handsomely, and I hope it will bring you a good return. Please let me know if you are in New York before the end of April, as I expect to be here until then.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO HELEN MCNENY SPRAGUE
March 20 [1932]
My Dear Helen;
We have had all our winter since I got back! I don’t mind—I like a long, cold spring. I was so glad to get your letter, and to hear that your father [Bernard McNeny] and Louise had been punished for laughing at us. I hope they got good and cold, too!
I’ve been going to lots of concerts and operas since my influenza left me. I do hope we can hear some music together some day. I’d love to take you to some of my favorite operas. I’ve not seen as much of Virginia as usual, though we manage to get together once a week, at least. Tonight she is to dine with me at Sherry’s. Last Saturday we lunched together and went shopping.
Oh Helen I am in dispair about the Lindbergh’s baby! I don’t believe they will ever see it again. The New Jersey & New York police magnates meet and “deplore the situation” and then go out to lunch. If I were the Lindberghs, I’d just go and live in another country where the right to privacy is recognized. Here they steal your baby and ruin your life and trample on all your decent feelings.
Don’t you let anybody kidnap young Sprague when he arrives. I’ll be awfully keen about him, and I know you’ll bring him up in a natural, easy, unsentimental way, without making a martyr of yourself or a victim of him. Oh these pale, wistful looking plants that have grown up under the shadow of the heavy-weight “mother love” pose! You weren’t brought up that way, and that was why you were such a dear child and such a pleasure to us all.
With love to you & your mother
Willa Cather
On September 1, 1931 (see above), Cather had written to Leach, the editor of Forum, complaining about a review by Granville Hicks that she considered unusually harsh.
TO HENRY GODDARD LEACH
May 25, 1932
My dear Dr. Leach:
Both of your letters eventually reached me, and I thank you for bearing my hurt feelings in mind. The review about which I wrote you was the only review that ever gave me a case of hurt feelings; and my grievance was entirely a personal one. I mean by that that I was hurt as a person, not as a writer. I had always looked upon The Forum as personally friendly to me in this City where personal friendships have almost ceased to exist under the rush of business relations. I felt that such a review was not at all in the line of ‘controversy’, since a writer cannot with any shred of dignity defend his own work.
But I am the last person in the world to suffer very long from a case of wounded vanity or to brood upon it. I have long ago forgotten my surprise and indignation, and I beg you to forget that I was for a moment indignant. I am just leaving New York for Canada but if I am in the City next winter, please let us have tea together and drink to Mr. Hicks—if that was his name.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
The original version of the following letter has not been found, but two slightly differing transcriptions, probably made by Knopf or his staff, have survived in the Knopf papers. Where there are minor differences between the two, we have privileged the one dated by the transcriber July 12, 1967, which seems to evince greater fidelity to transcriptional details.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
June 20 [1932]
Dear Alfred:
If I had been told that one of my friends was soon to die, your father [Samuel Knopf] would have been almost the last for whom death seemed possible—unless in an accident of some kind. He simply seemed to me one of the strongest people I knew, in body and in purpose. (I am
astonished to learn his age.) I didn’t see him very often during a winter, but I always felt he was “there”, in a very positive sense, and even five minutes with him invariably set me up. I had absolute confidence in him. He was my kind—by that I mean that he was one of the persons whom I admire, respect, understand, at once and without reservation, by instinct. There are not many of the younger men in whom I feel that kind of confidence; that in art, or business, or merely in human behavior, they will always see that the straight thing and the crooked thing are not the same, even if they do not shout about it. That mere perception is the thing that counts: without it human life would be too unutterably dull and filthy. If all the great “loyalties” are utter lies—why then, they are simply ever so much better than the truth. And that was what brought ideals out of the dung heap in the first place—because creatures weren’t content with dung, though it is always there and, in a sense, more “real”. I don’t mean to be writing you this way, but you are, thank God, one of those few younger men in whom I do believe. Though in you it takes a different form than in your father, in its essence it’s the same quality. I think it’s the best thing you got from him, and I hope you’ll always cherish it. (If you don’t you’ll be unhappy, I can tell you that!) I don’t expect you to be a reformer, I merely expect you to preserve intact and to make better still that delicate instrument inside one which knows the cheap from the fine. The recognition of the really fine is simply one of the richest pleasures in life.