by Willa Cather
So Sally [Dorothy and John Fisher’s daughter] is getting married, and my oldest nephew is getting engaged! My goodness, where have all the years gone to? It’s all terribly perplexing, my dear. But I enjoy life immensely—when I forget it.
I’m off for Canada next week (Whale Cove, Grand Manan, New Brunswick) Please let me know where you are going this summer. Not Germany now, I think. Thank you dear for your kind judgments, and your loyalty to early memories—memories of early youth, when such little things could produce wonders of excitement and joy.
Lovingly
Willa
When Cather wrote the following to the only son of Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Pat was fifteen years old.
TO ALFRED A. “PAT” KNOPF JR.
August 15 [1933]
My dear Pat;
What original ideas you have for a vacation pastime, to be sure! I like a retreat from the world, but not just in the way you have selected. Well, when you do go to New Mexico to ride, you’ll be happier with your appendix out, I can tell you that. I am doing lots of walking up here, on rather rough trails that run along the edge of the sea-cliffs. There are few beaches, and anyhow it’s too cold to bathe. We have had only one day when the thermometer went above eighty-two. The Italian air fleet on their return trip went right over this island, right over my little house at 2:15 in the afternoon and wrecked my afternoon nap. I thought them ugly beasts, with their ribs all showing, and shook my fist at them.
I hope you are over the uncomfortable part of an operation by this time. You must come to see me whenever you are in town next winter, and let’s plan a theatre party on our own, without letting anyone chaperone us! I’d love that.
Have a good time while you are getting well, and make them give you good things to eat. I wish I could send you one of the lobsters we pull out here.
With much love, my dear boy,
Your special friend
Willa Cather
TO ZOË AKINS
[August 26, 1933]
Whale Cove, Grand Manan Island
Darling Zoë;
The book-ends did not reach me in time—I left town July 8th—but my secretary is holding them for me. Nothing can come into Canada now without the bill of sale. But the white and the green knitted jackets, which were presents from you, are here and are my constant companions on this breezy coast. They comfort my sore shoulder in the most friendly way.
I’ve had all kinds of a summer—some good, some bad. Mary Virginia spent her vacation with me here, and that I did enjoy.
I’m working on a book about a very silly young girl [Lucy Gayheart], and I lose patience with her. Perhaps I am too old for that sort of thing. At any rate, it does not put me in a holiday mood as some books have done. My little hut here looks very pretty, buried in roses and hollyhocks, and sitting on the cliffs at the very edge of the sea. I’m fond of the place. I’m fond of Zoë, too, and I wish you could drop down in this wild spot sometime. Newspapers always three days late, maid three times a week, no radio on this island. World-affairs never touch us.—Except that the damned Italian air fleet, on its return trip, did go over this island, over this house at 2:30, and wrecked my afternoon nap!
Lovingly, dear Zoë
Willa
Willa Cather with her niece Mary Virginia Auld on Grand Manan Island, 1933 (photo credit 9.2)
TO ALFRED AND BLANCHE KNOPF
October 26 [1933]
My Dear Blanche and Alfred;
I am certainly a pig, or I would have thanked you before this for the splendid package of books you sent me. I haven’t looked into the Bullett, but all the others are good. Work and the fine weather have kept me from writing letters. My excuse for not thanking you for the books is–––industry! This morning I finished the first draft of Lucy Gayheart. I’m by no means out of the jungle, but now I know there’s a trail through, and a reason for going through—at least, there is to me. It will take a hard winter’s work, and you, my good friends, will help to keep the dogs off me, I know. I know, because you’ve done it more than once. I haven’t learned to work in that apartment awfully well; maybe I can arrange things better this winter. If I can’t I’ll come back to Jaffrey!
I had a cunning note from Pat last week.
The weather is glorious—my ankle does splendidly on a four mile walk, I’ve not tried it further. Wild clouds and very low ones, as in France; the mountain dark purple all day yesterday, the top of it powdered with snow, and the sky rolling masses of silver and purple and black from morning until night. (This sounds as if I were trying to work off some “writing” on you, but since you know the mountain, there’s some point in mentioning it’s present complexion.)
With love to the both of you
Willa Cather
Cyril Clemens, founder of the Mark Twain Society and editor of the Mark Twain Quarterly, was a distant cousin of the author, not his son.
TO CYRIL CLEMENS
December 28 [1933]
570 Park Avenue, New York City
Dear Mr. Clemens;
It will give me great pleasure to receive the medal from the International Mark Twain Society, and I appreciate the honor which the Society confers in this award. I have always been proud of a story which Albert Bigelow Paine tells in his Life of Mark Twain. It seems that your father once found an early poem of mine [“The Palatine”] re-printed in a newspaper, and he showed it to Mr. Paine and commended it with some enthusiasm. I think Mr. Paine quoted several stanzas of the poem in his book—the third volume, if I remember rightly. I was a very young writer at that time, and a word from Mark Twain, spoken to a third person, meant a great deal to me.
Very sincerely yours
Willa Cather
Excuse my tardy reply to your letter; I have just returned from northern Canada.
In the fall of 1933 Ida Tarbell, whom Cather knew from her days at McClure’s, wrote Cather as part of a campaign to raise money to provide a modest income for S. S. McClure, who was financially destitute.
TO IDA TARBELL
January 7 [1934]
Dear Miss Tarbell;
I am so afraid I may forget the check for the fund for Mr. McClure, that I am sending it to you now, when I am writing a whole sheaf of checks.
Sometime we are going to meet together, aren’t we? Why is it that one has less time for one’s own as one grows older?
Affectionately
Willa Cather
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
January 27, 1934
My dear Carrie:
Mr. Cyril Clemens, son of Mark Twain, is President of the International Mark Twain Society, to which men of letters in all countries belong. The Society recently held a contest to decide what is the most memorable and representative American novel in the last thirty-five years, the writer of this novel to be awarded a silver medal by the Mark Twain Society. The majority votes were for Antonia, and the medal is waiting for me in St. Louis whenever I have time to go and get it.
Out of a number of reports on Antonia which were sent to the Society, there is one which I think you might like to have (chiefly because it is so well written) to keep in your copy of Antonia. Now, don’t show it to the town cats or put it in the paper, or do anything to make [blacked out] and [blacked out] want to scratch my eyes out any worse than they do. Of course, I want you to show it to Mary, and you might show it to Helen Mac. [McNeny] some time, because I know neither of them wants to murder me. I want you to have it because it particularly takes notice of the fact that, though there have been many imitations of Antonia and some of them good, I really was the one who first broke the ground.
Oh yes, there is another reason why I don’t want you to show this article about; a lot of our fellow townsmen would go chasing out to look poor Annie [Pavelka] over and would agree as to what a liar I am. You never can get it through peoples heads that a story is made out of an emotion or an excitement, and is not made out of the legs and arms and faces of one’s friends or acquaintances. Two Friends, for
instance, was not really made out of your father [James L. Miner] and Mr. [William Newman] Richardson; it was made out of an effect they produced on a little girl who used to hang about them. The story, as I told you, is a picture; but it is not the picture of two men, but of a memory. Many things about both men are left out of this sketch because they made no impression on me as a child; other things are exaggerated because they seemed just like that to me then.
As for Antonia, she is really just a figure upon which other things hang. She is the embodiment of all my feeling about those early emigrants in the prairie country. The first thing I heard of when I got to Nebraska at the age of eight was old Mr. Sadalaak’s [Francis Sadilek] suicide, which had happened some years before. It made a great impression on me. People never stopped telling the details. I suppose from that time I was destined to write Antonia if I ever wrote anything at all.
Now I don’t often write, even to my dearest friends, about my own work, but you just tuck this away where you can read it and when people puzzle you, or come at you and say that I idealize everything and exaggerate everything, you can turn to this letter and comfort yourself. The one and sole reason that my “exaggerations” get across, get across a long way (Antonia has now been translated into eight languages), is that these things were not exaggerations to me. I felt just like that about all those early people. If I had exaggerated my real feeling or stretched it one inch, the whole book would have fallen as flat as a pancake, and would have been a little ridiculous. There is just one thing you cannot fake or counterfeit in this world, my dear Carrie, and that is real feeling, feeling in people who try to govern their hearts with their heads.
I did not start out to write you a long lecture, but some day I might get bumped off by an automobile, and then you’d be glad to have a statement which is just as true as I have the power to make it.
My heart to you always,
Willie
P.S. I had a wonderful afternoon with Irene when she was here, and I am so happy that she and Mr. Weisz are going to escape from this troubled part of the world. Isn’t he a good sport?
TO VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
March 22, 1934
My dear Mr. Stefansson:
I am t[h]rilled to think you cast a ballot for me, but why in the world for membership in the Philosophical Society? Don’t you know that I am the least philosophical person in the world? I cannot read five pages of Hegel, no not five paragraphs, without tying my head up in cold water. Santayana and Bergson are the only philosophers I can read with pleasure—and perhaps that is only because they both write well. However, I thank you warmly for your vote, and if I am actually made a member of this dignified body, I shall try to cultivate my mind a little. At any rate, I shall have had the pleasure of hearing from you.
Always cordially yours,
Willa Cather
In the spring of 1934 Cather badly sprained her left wrist, marking the beginning of many years of pain and trouble with both of her hands.
TO ELSIE CATHER
May 7, 1934
My dear Sister:
I am so awfully sorry to hear that you have been sick and low spirited—any one who is sick is low spirited. Now you must not take all those rumors from Red Cloud too seriously. Will Auld’s behavior may affect our fortunes, but it cannot affect our honor [Auld, a banker in Red Cloud, and Cather’s sister Jessica divorced in 1933]. The more he shows himself up there, the more people will understand that we got a very bad deal—no, nobody wrote me what has been going on. Mrs. Rickerson’s little card to Molly, which you yourself sent me, told me the whole story.
I had that pleasant evening with Bishop Beecher just about a week before I got my hand hurt. Of course I realize, my dear, that you had plenty of troubles of your own—and if I had only known that you had them, I might have sent you a few books or a few flowers or something to amuse you; but like you, I was pretty much concentrated on my own troubles. An absolutely smashed hand is such a serious thing for a writer,—and just now it proves to be a very serious thing for Alfred Knopf to have a writer with a smashed hand. I really cannot get the book done for fall publication, as I see things now. For two months I have simply put in the whole of every day with doctors, massage, electric treatments and hot water treatments. I have at last got out of splints, but my wrist and thumb are now very stiff as the result of being tied to a board for two months, and it will take a lot of massage to give them back any elasticity. However, I am working again now every morning by hand (of course, I cannot type), and as a result am feeling much more cheerful. Alfred Knopf read the first third of the new book last night, and telephoned me this morning that he would wait any number of months or years for the rest, and that he had “scarcely believed he had it in him any more to be so enchanted by the sheer grace of a character in a story”. The book is about a very young girl and the title will be simply “Lucy Gayheart”. It is modern, western, very romantic, non-Catholic. So there we are!
I have been sending a lot of books to the Red Cloud library—some very good ones—and if only I had known you were sick, I would have sent them to you. Don’t hesitate for a minute to go back to Red Cloud this summer; it is full of our friends and there are very few friends of J. W. Auld there.
Lovingly,
Willie
P.S. Here is a little check I want you to spend on keeping up your yard. I always feel that if the yard is nice, people think pleasantly of father and mother when they pass by.
W.
TO LOUISE GUERBER BURROUGHS
Sunday [June 10, 1934]
My Dear Louise:
Your lovely roses have been such delightful companions to me all this day while I was mending the roads in “Lucy Gayheart”. In these days one has to squeeze one’s memory hard to remember just what it was like to walk over frozen country roads in certain weathers. Not very important, and I had side-stepped it. But this morning I sat down and made myself remember.
With love
W.S.C.
TO EARL AND ACHSAH BARLOW BREWSTER
July 1, 1934
My dear Brewsters:
I suppose Edith wrote you that I had a hurt hand for most of the winter, and that is why I have not written to tell you how much I enjoyed your book on Lawrence [D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence]. I think the letters themselves show a much nicer side of him than most of those in the big collection, and oh, I very much like Earl’s and Achsah’s own words about their friend! It seems to me that they are almost the only honest words that have been written about Lawrence, except [Dorothy] Brett’s funny little book [Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship] which was honest in its way, and I thought quite charming. But, as you know, most of his friends wrote about Lawrence to exhibit themselves and not at all to enlighten one about D. H. L. I had a letter yesterday from Isabel[le] Hambourg, telling me that your book gives her a better idea of Lawrence than anything she has ever read—but probably she herself has written you to that effect.
Edith and I hope to get away to Grand Manan in the second week of July. I have been kept in town through the heat by rather complicated business affairs. Moreover, I insisted upon finishing, before I left, the book which was interrupted for more than three months during the winter. I have got it done, but I expect it would have been a better “do” if I could have written it without interruption. For three months I really did nothing but take care of my hand—I made a career of it, and was a trained nurse with one patient.
How often we think and talk of you, dear friends, and wish we were on our way to see you. We had hoped to go abroad this spring, you know, but my hand changed our plans. One of these days we will be on our way to you, however, and God speed the time.
With all good wishes to you both,
Affectionately,
Willa Cather
Cather’s brother Roscoe was a successful banker, and she often turned to him for help with financial matters. When she needed to attend to some financial matters in Red Cloud, he generously traveled t
here as her representative.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
July 2 [1934]
New York City
My Dear Roscoe;
So nice a letter as yours deserved a speedy answer. I never thought of not paying the cost of that trip, my dear boy; I was asking enough of you in asking you to give the matter your attention. But since you want to do all that for me as a gift, I will take it in the high spirit in which you offer it. I don’t know when a letter has pleased me so much as yours—it sounded a lot like your father. I think he left to all of his sons some of his fine courtesy. Even poor Jim has some of it. It makes you all just a little more chivalrous than the men around you. I am sure Virginia and the twins feel it.
The heat is very bad here, and I won’t get away before the middle of July. I stayed on in the heat to finish the interrupted book, and did it. More than that, I sold the serial rights for a good price. It will come out in the Woman’s Home Companion from April 1935 to Sept 1935 [actually March–July 1935]. This, of course, delays the book publication—it will be out Sept 1st, 1935.