by Willa Cather
When I began this letter I did not foresee that it would take this turn (rather sermon-ish) but I usually write as I feel, and the shock of your father’s death brings up the old question:—What do I really admire in people, and what is worth saving in a time when so much is being scrapped. But we needn’t save it: it has an artful dodge of saving itself. It has survived all the “realities” and “discoveries” and has been through times much worse than ours. It can well rest a hundred years or two.
With my love and sympathy and confidence,
Willa Cather
Cather’s story “Two Friends” was first published in the Woman’s Home Companion in July 1932 with illustrations by Walter Everett. The magazine paid her $3,500 for it. One of the central characters, R. E. Dillon, was inspired by Carrie Miner Sherwood’s father, James L. Miner.
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
July 4 [1932]
My Dear Carrie;
I don’t know if “Two Friends” is out yet, but I saw proofs of it before I left New York and ever since have wanted to prepare you for the dreadful illustrations. The editor gives a western story to some nut who has never been west of Hoboken, and who thinks that all Western men are rough-necks. I hate publishing stories in magazines, anyway, and only do it because they pay me very well.
Elsie wrote that when she went through Red Cloud the home yard looked lovely; I wish I could see it. Our little place here is so green and fresh this year, and though it is so primative and has no bath room, we find it very comfortable. I have invited Mary Virginia [Auld] to spend her month’s vacation as my guest here. I expect her the middle of July. I shall put her up at the little colony about a quarter of a mile across the pine woods, where I used to stay before I had a house and where we still go for our meals. She will have more freedom there than here, and she can run down here when she wishes. There is not much gaiety here, but I hope she will enjoy the beauty of the place.
Please tell Helen Mac. [McNeny] that I was delighted to get her letter about young Bernard [Sprague]. I have just unpacked and oiled my typewriter, so you must pardon a messy, oily letter. When you think of it, Carrie, please send me the letter from Borneo, and that from the nice priest, I sent you some time ago; I am trying to file some of my papers up here.
I do hope you and Mary liked “Two Friends”, at least that there was nothing in it that struck you as false. It is not meant to be a portrait of the two men, but a picture of something that they suggested to a child.
With love always
Willie
The version of “Two Friends” published in Woman’s Home Companion included a description of an astronomical event called, in the story, a “transit of Venus.” William Lyon Phelps, a professor of English at Yale University, promptly wrote telling Cather that the proper term for what the characters witness is an “occultation of Venus.” The following was a Western Union telegram.
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
July 30 [1932]
Grand Manan Island
CHANGE TRANSIT TO OCCULTATION STOP I SAW IT WHATEVER IT WAS
WILLA CATHER
TO WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
August 16 [1932]
Grand Manan Island
Dear Mr. Phelps;
I am everlastingly grateful to you for calling my attention to my astronomical blunder. I knew that in the summer of 1893, sitting on a board sidewalk in a little Nebraska town, I did see the planet Venus go behind the moon and reappear. The neighbors said it was a “transit” of Venus. When I wrote the story last year, I could easily have checked up on this point, but I knew I had seen the planet behave in such a manner, and it did not occur to me that I had better make sure that I was giving the correct name to its behaviour.
Since your letter was forwarded to me I have had the matter looked up by the Knopf office, and we find that there was an occultation of Venus in the summer of 1893. The correction has been made in the second printing; your kindly letter will probably save me from writing many letters to indignant scientists, and has saved me from making the same blunder in the English edition; we cabled Cassells at once to make the change.
Very gratefully yours
Willa Cather
Knopf published Obscure Destinies in August 1932. Unusually, “Old Mrs. Harris” was published in a magazine after the book appeared—in the Ladies’ Home Journal of September, October, and November 1932, under the title “Three Women.” For this long story, she was paid very well indeed: $15,000.
Cather’s friend Zoë Akins married the British set and costume designer Hugo Rumbold in 1932, at age forty-six.
TO ZOË AKINS
September 16 [1932]
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
My Very Dear Zoë;
I am so glad to have a letter from you! Of course, marriage is always a gamble, except with children of eighteen, perhaps, who learn everything together—and therefore never learn much but how to get on with each other. But the worst thing is to be bored to death by a smiling, pale personality—and you have escaped that fate by a wide margin, I gather! What with a new husband and a new house, you ought to find life pretty interesting. The pictures of the house reached me at Grand Manan, Canada, and I got a great thrill out of them. I was able to pick out many of the changes you have made. Most of all I loved the picture of that heavenly room with so little in it, so that one felt the room itself and not an assemblage of things. It surely requires a much finer sense of form to make a room without things than with them—also, I imagine, more money. It’s the proper spaces that are expensive, in any art. I love Green Fountains for a name. It’s so very different from other “place names”.
I’m awfully glad you like Mrs. Harris. Of course that’s much the best of the three. The right things came together in the right relation, I thought. You know the types, but I wonder what it can mean to people who don’t know the charming and untruthful South.—
I’m going back to New York next week, and will be at the Grosvenor while I look for an apartment. I almost hope I won’t find an apartment! Zoë, I’ve just happened to read “Colomba” [by Prosper Mérimée] over, very slowly. What [a] beautiful and splendidly poised thing it is: the most terrific happenings slide easily and noiselessly into the narrative, as they always do in life, when the stage is never set for the moment that uplifts us or destroys us. The un-expectedness of life is what makes it interesting; the events are logical, but we never see the cause and effect until after the events have happened. That quality of unexpected developments which are at the same time logical, has almost disappeared from modern writing. I wish I could get rid of “atmosphere” and be another kind of writer for awhile. I’m tired of being my kind!
My love to you, dear Zoë.
Willa
TO THOMAS MASARYK
September 23 [1932]
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Dear President Masaryk;
Some weeks ago I wrote my publisher to send you my new book. I could not autograph it, for I was then travelling in a remote part of Canada. The book has probably reached you before this, and if you have had leisure to read it you probably agree with me that one of the stories at least, “Old Mrs. Harris”, strikes a more authentic note than the Quebec story I sent you a year ago. A book which grows out of admiration and study never has the authentic ring of a book that grows out of early experiences. Nevertheless, I do believe in a rotation of crops,—in writing as well as in agriculture.
You asked me, after I sent you the Quebec story, whether I were on the road to becoming a Catholic. By no means! I do, however, admire the work of the Catholic missionary priests on this continent.
I find I have a copy of a letter I wrote Governor Cross of Connecticut, after his review of the book appeared. I am enclosing it, as an explanation of how I happened to write “Shadows on the Rock”. The work of the French Catholic missionaries was unique in that they brought with them a kind of culture and a way of living. These endure to this day—in the Province of Quebec, at least.
Faithfully yours
Willa Cather
TO JOHN SEXTON KENNEDY
November 1, 1932
My dear Mr. Kennedy;
I am sorry if I wrote you an unenthusiastic letter a year ago; but sometimes when one has to reply to a great many letters at one sitting, one’s enthusiasm does get pumped rather dry, you know. I surely can thank you very warm heartedly for your appreciation of the stories in “Obscure Destinies”. Those three stories are, every one of them, very near to my heart, for personal reasons. Moreover, I want to do all I can to overcome the provincial American prejudice against stories of that length. This is the only country in which stories of that length are dismissed rather lightly as minor pieces, simply because they are short. It is the custom here to rank a novel like the “Arrow of Gold”, which is distinctly Conrad’s second best, as more important than a masterpiece like “Youth”, which could scarcely be better than it is—and which, of course, would have been quite ruined had he tried to expand it into a long narrative.
The long short story has always held such a dignified and important place in French literature that I wish it might command that same position in our own country.
No, it does not distress me at all to hear that a young man in Baltimore is working on a thesis, but if you know him, I suggest that you warn him to approach his subject in a more rational manner than that employed by young Mr. MacNamara, whose article [“Phases of American Religion in Thornton Wilder and Willa Cather”] in the [May 1932] Catholic World you may have seen. It is absurd to measure “spiritual growth”, or even intellectual growth, chronologically. Our great enlightenments always come in flashes. The spirit of man has its ups and downs like his body, and the Roman Church of all others, it seems to me, has always had the wisdom and the kindliness to realize that instability in us.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO ZOË AKINS
November 21 [1932]
My Darling Zoë;
I have just come back from the country and find your telegram, and the account of Hugo’s death in the Sunday papers. What a dreadful shock for you, to have a big strong man go out like that! It makes one catch one’s breath to think of it. Wasn’t it fortunate that you had that jolly honeymoon together in Mexico, since this was going to happen? But why did it happen so soon,—less than a year after you were married. 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.
Keep up your routine, dear Zoë, keep your life going as you’ve always done: you’ll be less lonely that way than if you sit and think about things. And, just for the time, cut out alcohol. One’s very apt to over do that when one is hard hit, and no ordinary human being can keep up with Jobyna [Howland] without disasterous results. I’m not knocking Jobyna, but she is rather spacious in capacity, as she is in size. I wish I could run out to see you for a week, but I’ve come back to town with a rather bad eye, (which now has a bandage on it) otherwise very well. I’ve just signed a lease for an apartment at 570 Park Ave. but I won’t be moving for several weeks yet—can’t even think of it until my eye clears up. It’s merely a slight infection, but painful. I’ll soon get the better of it. Do get the most you can out of your house and mind and thoughts. Personal life is rather a failure, always; biologically so. But something rather nice does happen in the mind itself as one grows older. If it hasn’t begun with you yet, keep your courage, it will happen. A kind of golden light comes as a compensation for many losses. You’ll see!! I wish I could have saved you this hard knock, my dear.
Willa
TO JENNIE C. MORSE CARSTENS
November 21, 1932
My dear Mrs. Carstens:
Of course, I have not time to reply to all the letters that come in to me; it is rather an unfair contest in correspondence, one against many.
But your letter has a nice friendly, neighborly ring that makes me wish to answer it, though it lay on my desk a long time unread while I was traveling. On reading it I feel as if I had been to a Sunday evening service in my own town of Red Cloud and heard some one talk about somebody’s books—not mine. You say you wonder why I have never written anything sympathetic about religion, and this rather astonishes me. I have had so many, many letters from clergymen, both Protestant and Catholic, telling me that they find a very strong religious theme in at least two of my books.
Perhaps you think that because “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is about the work of Catholic missionaries, it is not concerned with religion as you know it.
Now, my dear lady, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am an Episcopalian, as were my father and mother. Bishop Beecher of Hastings, Nebraska, confirmed me. I am a Protestant, but not a narrow minded one. If you make a fair minded study of history you cannot be narrow. What organization was it that kept the teachings of Jesus Christ alive between the year 300 A.D. and the days of Martin Luther? I am sure that your minister will admit that nothing but a powerful organization could have brought the beliefs of the early church across to us through the anarchy and brutality that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
This is a rather solemn and pedantic reply to your pleasant and neighborly letter, but I do think all Christians ought to know a little more history before they decide that there is only one kind of religion. I am sure I need not tell you, dear Mrs. Carstens, that this letter is entirely personal and confidential, and is not for quotation or publication. I have no objection, however, to your showing it to your minister; perhaps he can prove to me that there were “Protestant” churches before Martin Luther, but I have never yet been able to find any convincing evidence that there were.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
The five peripatetic years Cather and Edith Lewis spent with no home address but the Grosvenor Hotel ended in the late fall of 1932 when they moved into an apartment at 570 Park Avenue, Cather’s last address in New York. That year also saw the publication of Mary Austin’s memoir Earth Horizon, in which she criticized Cather for celebrating French priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a book Cather partially wrote in Austin’s house.
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
November 22 [1932]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dear Mabel;
Great news—we have at last taken an apartment, and are terribly busy fitting it up. I got back from Canada October 10th, but had to dash out to Chicago almost at once. I came back and signed the lease and began shopping for rugs and curtains, then had to go to Chicago again! But now most of the shopping is done, furniture got out of storage and set in place, cabinet-makers at work on bookshelves etc. We are staying right on at the Grosvenor and settling the new place slowly. Edith is desperately busy at the office, and if I shop for more than a few hours at a time I buy the most absurd things. We expect to move in about two weeks from now.
What do you think of Mrs. Austin’s book? It’s amazing how everybody mis-understood her and nobody ever “got the point”. It’s a big job to set out to be a genius in this ruthless age when even kings have to watch their step and pay their tailor bills. As for my base conduct—you know why I went to the house for a few hours every day for about a week—merely to be polite. I had two perfectly good rooms at La Fonda. And how the devil could
I help it that the first archbishops of New Mexico were French? As I don’t wear a Spanish comb in my hair I didn’t mind it a bit that Bishop Lamy was a Frenchman.
H. G. Wells threatened H. & M. [Houghton Mifflin, publishers of Earth Horizon] with a libel suit, sent furious cables, and they had to knock out his confession on Hampstead Heath and make new plates, but some thirty thousand had already got out.
Have you read Hemingway’s book [Death in the Afternoon]—of course you have. Don’t you find it quite stunning? I don’t see us getting to Mexico this winter. I simply have to have a dwelling place and my own books and things about me. Then I can travel in comfort and not feel like a tramp. Edith has wanted to write to you for a long while, but holding an important business job in N.Y. these days means working like fury. I hope she’ll resign soon. She had a good long summer in Canada, about four months. At Grand Manan, and at Jaffrey N.H. where I spent two weeks, all my friends were reading “Lorenzo” [Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos]. I’d have been bothered to death by the curious, so I shut ’em off by saying you had said what you wanted to say, and I had no authority to add an oral appendix.
Please write me again before you go away. I’m awfully excited about getting an apartment.
With love
Willa
New address is 570 Park Avenue
(That’s at the corner of Park & 63rd, just behind the Colony Club)
In the early 1930s, many of Cather’s old friends in Webster County, Nebraska, were, like most Americans, facing economic hardship.
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
Sunday [December 11, 1932?]
Grosvenor Hotel, New York City
Dearest Carrie;
Thank you for sending the book of reviews so promptly. Alfred Knopf wanted to use some extracts from them. They got here in plenty of time.