The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  I am trying to live day by day, and not to worry; but when I’m very tired my philosophy fails me! Your love and interest is a help to me.

  I will write you later about Virginia’s letter. She seems to be finding her own way.

  Devotedly

  Willie

  Marie Meloney, who had a wide social circle, was a prominent journalist and editor of This Week magazine.

  TO MARIE MATTINGLY MELONEY

  May 29, 1935

  Dear Mrs. Meloney;

  I have just returned to town for a few days and find your letter awaiting me. I have been wanting to write you for a long while, to thank you for your kindness in delivering to me Mr. [James M.] Barrie’s gracious message about My Antonia. Please accept my belated thanks for your friendly office in sending me an extract from his letter to you.

  Regarding the suggestion you make to me, I am afraid I can only shake my head. I never have written, and I very much doubt if I could write, a story at the suggestion of another person. I have never tried to write a story that was not the outcome of some rather sharp personal experience; and, of course, you know as well as I, one cannot go out and hunt for personal experiences. Everything that one goes out and hunts for is second-hand—and second-rate. I have been very much interested in looking over the copies of This Week, and when I return to New York next November, I shall follow its career with every good wish in the world.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Willa Cather

  In the summer of 1935 Cather and Lewis sailed for Europe. They spent several weeks in Italy, and then went to Paris again, where Cather saw Isabelle Hambourg for the last time. This was her final trip to Europe.

  TO MARY MINER CREIGHTON

  August 8 [1935]

  aboard the Rex

  My Dear Mary;

  Here we are, beyond the Azores, and the splendid autumn flowers you and Irene sent me still make our dinner table lovely day after day and turn my thoughts to my dear friends at home. So far we have had a rather rough passage, heavy seas with intense heat—a rather unusual combination. I was terribly tired when we left New York, but Mary Virginia came down to the boat with us and unpacked my steamer trunk and all my toilet things so deftly that I set off with a neat cabin. Before we were out of the narrows I went to bed and stayed there for 24 hours. For the first time in my life I had dinner and breakfast in bed on shipboard! Yesterday I began to feel like myself again, and today I am enjoying everything. I am never a sick [traveler], but to be terribly tired is about as bad.

  This letter is for Irene as well as Mary, and it will be put off at Gibraltar and sent back on La Savoie, sister ship of the Rex. I want to tell Irene that the remedy against sea-sickness my doctor gave Edith has worked perfectly, and she has not been miserable, even in the very rough weather. It is a new German preparation, very effective, but one has to have blood tests and heart tests made before a physician will give it to one.

  Irene kept urging me to make this trip, after I had rather lost heart about it, and if any spring comes back into me (as I begin to believe it will) I shall feel that I largely owe it to her. She was with me in the darkest hours of my discouragement about Isabelle, when I was too tired to decide anything for myself. The slippers she sent for Isabelle are in my big trunk, just as she did them up. My love to you both and to Carrie goes with this. I get so much comfort in thinking of our long friendship, and how it has grown so much stronger through the years, binding us all together. If I didn’t have those things at the bottom of my heart I wouldn’t get much out of blue seas or sunny lands.

  Devotedly

  Willie

  TO ROSCOE CATHER

  September 8 [1935]

  Hotel Royal Danieli, Venice

  Dear Brother;

  Edith and I have been in Italy not quite a month—and it seems six months! We have both been well, and have had a most successful trip so far. After ten days in the high, cool Dolomites, we dropped down to Venice by motor. Of course foreign travel is never all roses, as people at home seem to think. In Venice the mosquitos always devour one, as they did when you drove us near Gray Bull [Greybull, Wyoming]; one sleeps under nets, and if a mosquito gets in there’s an all-night struggle. If I go out on the Grand Canal to see the moonlight, I pay for it by such a horribly swollen face as is keeping me indoors today.

  Sept 25th I go on to Paris to be with Isabelle, who is slowly losing ground.

  “Lucy” is doing well, but not brilliantly—nothing like the “Archbishop” or “Shadows”.

  Lovingly

  Willie

  TO YALTAH MENUHIN

  October 23 [1935]

  Paris

  My Darling Yaltah;

  Your letter from South Africa got to Paris in record time and caught me just a few days before Miss Lewis and I sail for home. It seemed miraculous that a letter could come so far and get here on October 21st! I want to leave this little word, so that you will know that it did reach me and it was such a happy surprise for both Edith and me. I wish I had been one of your jolly mining party, although my experience of caves in the Southwest, and the underground prisons of Paris has made me dread all sub-terranean explorations. I like to be on top of the earth.

  How in the name of all queer chances did you ever come upon Lucy Gayheart on the other side of the world! I meant to send it to you when you got back, but it never occured to me that book-post could catch up with you in Australia or New Zealand.

  Edith and I are busy getting some warm clothes for the boat, and preparing to slip away without saying goodbye to Isabelle, as she has requested us to do. It’s very hard to go when I know how ill she is, and yet I feel that I can not stay longer. I must get home and begin to pull my life together again. Marutha [Menuhin] will understand that. Living without work and without any particular purpose for so long has made me feel, not like the boy who lost his shadow, but like the shadow which lost the boy! That is more serious you know.

  This short note is to greet you one and all when you reach Paris. If I were here then, I would give all five of you a hug as strong as a Russian bear’s. I expect you have all grown very much, even Marutha has grown in pounds, I hope. (Excuse hotel pen.) I wish I could be here to hear Yehudi’s first European recital after all the changes of thought and feeling that such a great experience must bring.

  Lovingly to every one of you,

  Willa Cather

  By late November of 1935 Cather was back in New York. One of the letters she had waiting for her was from an English professor at the University of Michigan, Carlton Wells, who identified a small detail about Cather’s use of Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah in Lucy Gayheart.

  TO CARLTON F. WELLS

  January 7, 1936

  New York City

  My dear Mr. Wells:

  I have just come back from a long stay in France and Italy, and the punishment of a holiday is that I have now to face a really terrifying mountain of letters which have been held for me here in my absence. I am working through this accumulation gradually and have just come upon your letter, to which I reply with real pleasure.

  You are one in about seventy-five thousand, apparently, for you are the only person who has noticed that I changed the text of the famous aria in the Elijah; changed it for exactly the purpose you divine. The whole story verges dangerously upon the sentimental (since youthful hero worship is really the theme of the first two parts of the book), and if I had used the text of that aria as it actually stands, it would have been quite unbearable. Among the letters I have so far read, there are at least a dozen from concert musicians to whom this story seems to have appealed; but not one of them has noticed my variation of the text, although several are baritones who have sung the Elijah many times. I am delighted to have found one reader who did notice it because, of course, to a writer all those slight changes in language have great importance—perhaps an exaggerated importance. Please let me thank you for your friendly letter and wish you all good things for the New Year.

/>   Very cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  TO MRS. SIDNEY MATTISON

  January 21, 1936

  Dear Mrs. Mattison:

  I don’t usually welcome namesakes very cordially, for the simple reason that I never liked my own first name. I never like feminine forms of masculine names, in fact. If I had known, when I first began to write, that my name would be printed about a good deal, I would certainly have changed it to Mary or Jane, or Janet. I could not have changed my real name, out of respect to my parents: but I could have changed my writing name, and I often wish I had.

  When I saw your little girl’s pictures however, she seemed like such a real little person that I wanted to write to her and give her my good wishes. Perhaps she won’t dislike the name as much as I do.

  Cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  [This accompanied the preceding cover letter:]

  My dear Namesake:

  Your mother has sent me several pictures of you, which makes me feel that you are a real little girl, and not just a name. She tells me that you are seven years old. That is a very nice age. I remember having enjoyed things very much when I was seven. Four years ago one of my dearest friends was seven years old—but, alas, that was four years ago, and now she is eleven. I hope your next four years will be as jolly as hers have been. The best thing I can wish for you is, that you will be absolutely sincere in your likes and dislikes—I don’t mean violent, but sincere. If, when you grow older, my books bore you terribly, be honest about it and don’t try to pretend to like them because some aunt or uncle tells you ought to like them, or that a great many people do like them. I would be ashamed of a namesake who did not know when she really liked a thing, and who did not stand up for her own tastes. I wish you lots of friends and happy vacations.

  Cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  Professor Wells wrote back to Cather to ask if her letter to him about the text of Elijah might be printed in a column by his friend William Lyon Phelps. He also mentioned that his students—to whom he had read the letter—enjoyed hearing it.

  TO CARLTON F. WELLS

  January 23, 1936

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  I am sorry not to be able to oblige you, but I never allow quotations from personal letters to be printed. When, among a great number of the rather flat and dreary letters I receive, I come upon one that is alive and intelligent, I am rather prone to answer it in a somewhat intimate and unembarrassed tone. I take for granted that a person who writes a discriminating and intelligent letter is the sort of person who would not use any portion of my letter for publicity of any kind.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Willa Cather

  I should like to oblige Mr. Phelps, but I shall do that at some other time, and in some other way. I did not even know that I was writing to your English class, Mr. Wells. English professors have many wiles, but I honestly thought you were interested in the question you asked me. O tempora, O mores! (The second “O” looks like a zero, certainly!) Enough: I become more cautious every day.

  W.S.C.

  TO WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

  February 17, 1936

  My dear Mr. Phelps:

  I got home from Europe just before Christmas and have not yet got through the mountain of letters which accumulated in my long absence, but I want to skip a few hundred unanswered letters and drop a line to you, because last night I picked up the Yale Review and read your article on Mark Twain [published December 1935].

  I knew Mark Twain during my first year in New York, when he was living on lower Fifth Avenue and spent most of his time in bed. Because I knew the man himself, Mr. [Van Wyck] Brooks’ book [The Ordeal of Mark Twain] has always seemed to me one of the most glaring pieces of misapprehension that ever happened in a world full of mistakes. Mr. Brooks simply has no idea of what the real man was like; and I am afraid the imaginary Mark Twain, Mr. Brooks creates, would never have written “Huckleberry Finn”. I don’t know Mr. Brooks personally, but I have always heard good things about his scholarship and integrity. When he wrote about Mark Twain, he simply made a bad choice of subject, and I suspect from the general tone of his book that he could never have understood old Mr. Clemens at all: and if he had chanced to know him, I am afraid the intercourse would have been a series of mild, but painful, shocks!

  This letter, you will understand, is confidential. It is not for me to contradict Mr. Brooks. But it is a great relief to me that some one has boldly refused to swallow this sentimental view of Mr. Clemens as a blighted genius, and you were certainly the man to do it. You could do it in the course of your usual activities; while I would have had to step so far out of mine, that it would have looked almost as if I had some personal grudge. I really feel very grateful to you. If Mr. Brooks could have seen that old lion in his bed telling stories to three or four young people, if he could have seen this for five minutes, he could never have written his book.

  Cordially yours,

  Willa Cather

  At some point Ferris Greenslet spoke with Cather about the possibility of Houghton Mifflin’s publishing an edition of her complete works, the sort of edition that would be finely designed and marketed to collectors.

  TO FERRIS GREENSLET

  March 8, 1936

  My dear Mr. Greenslet:

  No, I have not so far had anything to do with influenza, and I am sorry to hear that you have had such a visitation. I have had plenty of sick friends however, and their many operations have kept me racing about among the hospitals until I sometimes think the only possible escape is to retire to a hospital myself.

  I want to consult you about three things.

  I. Are you still anxious to do a subscription edition in 1937 or 1938? Publishers sometimes change their minds as the times change. I hope to have time to run over some of the books and make corrections this summer, and that is why I ask you if you still adhere to the plan as we discussed it. If your proposition still holds, it was awfully considerate of you not to bother me about it at all in this past year when so many perplexing and unexpected things have come up. You remember the mild poet’s remark “Only the sorrows of others cast”, etc. Well, sometimes they can quite snow one under.

  II. Tell me please, is there now a garage on the site of Mrs. Fields’s old house at 148 Charles Street? Perhaps this is only a legend?

  III. I am getting up a short book of essays for Alfred Knopf because we have been bothered with a good many requests to reproduce certain stray pieces of writing, which I think Mrs. Fields would have called “papers”. I want to include a little sketch of Mrs. Fields which I did as a review of Mark Howe’s “Memories of a Hostess”, and following that a short article on Miss Jewett. The latter I haven’t yet clearly planned, because I wanted first to know from you whether you would be quite willing that I should use a considerable portion of the preface I wrote for the Mayflower edition. I would, of course, state either in the article or in a note at the bottom of the page, that this was written as a preface, naming the book and publishers. You will remember that by my own wish there was no question of compensation when I did the preface for you, and I would not like to appear an “Indian giver” in asking your permission to use it again. I am asking you, really, because I said some things there about the quality of her work which I think I could not say quite so well again.

  The times have changed so much that it might be wiser not to call forth Miss Jewett’s shade into this present world, which would be so objectionable to her. The language in which she was such an artist has almost ceased to be. The brassy young Jews and Greeks from New York University have made the only language that is much heard in New York today. I may get discouraged and drop the notion altogether. It might be better if we could hide her away for awhile.

  I suppose the thing that has made me rather want to do a little sketch of Miss Jewett, twenty years after, is that I get a good many letters from young people, both in this country and in England, asking me about
her in a very reverent tone.