by Willa Cather
—WILLA CATHER TO FERRIS GREENSLET, November 25, 1940
Willa Cather, about age five, Winchester, Virginia (photo credit 11.1)
SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL, the novel Cather had been working toward in the last years of the 1930s, was published on December 7, 1940, her sixty-seventh birthday. As she emphasized in many letters from those years, this, her last completed novel, had its origin in something she witnessed when she was only five years old: the reunion of two women, a mother who remained with the white family that had once enslaved her and a daughter who escaped slavery before emancipation and fled to Canada. Working on it was essentially a retreat into memory, a way to find comfort as death and war clouded her world. And yet the novel is by no means a comfortable, sentimental book. It is a complex story of danger, injustice, and fear—yet another example of Cather’s consistent desire to make her work reflect an honest and thoughtful view of humanity.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
January 8 [1940]
Dear Brother;
It’s hard to keep in touch—hard for me to tell you much about the realities of my life. I don’t send you fan letters. But a writer’s relations to his or her publisher is a very vital fact—means happiness or constant anxiety. Last spring I happened to mention to Alfred that I thought it was very kind of Jan, among other things to send me the copy of an unpublished story which Isabelle had at her death.
“Do you mean to say that you have a completed manuscript that I have never seen?”
“But this is only a short story—you couldn’t possibly publish it alone. I sent a copy to Isabelle because she is an invalid—to amuse her. I call it “The Old Beauty”. Of course, if you’d like to see it–––”
“I would.”
So I sent it over to his apartment. The first letter came, and I acknowledged it. Then came the second, which gave me great pleasure.
Somewhere I still have a letter from him, dated “Christmas morning, 4 oclock.” I had been at his house for a Christmas Eve party (awful English, excuse!) and I took with me the ms. of “A Lost Lady” thinking he might read it over the holiday. He sat up after the party that night and read it, and wrote me that night at 4 a.m. The letter reached me by special messenger on Christmas morning. So it began:
“Christmas morning,
four oclock.
My dear Miss Cather.
I think you are a very great writer. –––––
The story struck him hard; and he was there at the bat when I pitched him a ball. (This figure is bad baseball, I know, but it expresses the relation between a writer and a live publisher, who isn’t afraid.)
A scrappy letter, my dear boy, but I’ve been in bed for a week, bronchitis, missing all the jolly things I would otherwise be doing with Yehudi and Nola. So I am taking my dullness out on you, and, writing in bed, I cannot write very clearly.
Please send Alfred Knopf’s two letters back to me. I thought you might like to see them.
With my love
Willie
Remember; we have a rendezvous. We will meet this spring or summer. If this damned Virginia book hadn’t made me so much trouble I’d be foot-loose now. But I want to get it done for Knopf’s sake, because he never nags or hurries me.
The short story referred to here did not appear until after Cather’s death, when Knopf published The Old Beauty and Others in 1948.
TO PENDLETON HOGAN
February 5, 1940
My dear Mr. Hogan:
You[r] letter has lain unanswered on my desk for a long time. When I returned from a vacation in the West, I found so many letters awaiting me that it has taken me three weeks to answer them. I cannot reply to yours very fully, simply because there are many letters still ahead of yours. You ask me one or two questions which I can touch upon briefly.
I am always glad when people tell me they like “My Mortal Enemy”, because it was a rather difficult story to write. You ask me why Ewan Grey and Esther do not come into the story again. Simply because their only use was to flash into the story for a moment, as one of the many examples of Myra’s extravagant friendships. To have mentioned them again in the latter part of the story would have been both confusing and misleading. She could not possibly keep all these people in her life, especially after she was ill and, so to speak, in exile. And I, who was merely painting a portrait of Myra, with reflections of her in various looking glasses hung about the room, would have been very foolish to try to account for any of these people whom Myra had loved and left behind. And it was the extravagance of her devotions that made her, in the end, feel that Oswald was her mortal enemy—that he had somehow been the enemy of her soul’s peace. Of course, her soul never could have been at peace. She wasn’t that kind of woman. I knew her very well indeed, and she was very much as I painted her. At least, many of her friends and relatives wrote to me that they recognized her immediately, although the story was not written or published until fifteen years after her death.
I think it is better to answer one question fully than to say a word in reply to half a dozen questions. I heartily appreciate your friendly and cordial letter, and I declare you a thoroughly well-posted reader. As to writing, you will do well at it if you enjoy it. I advise you, as I do many young writers, to devote a good deal of your leisure to a study of the French language and literature. They are the best correctives for the faults to which we American[s] are prone. Good luck, and believe me,
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
Cather did not explicitly name the prototype for Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy, and many theories have been put forward, inspired in part by this letter. The most convincing case, made by Charles Johanningsmeier, is that Myra was based on Hattie McClure, the wife of editor and publisher S. S. McClure.
TO ZOË AKINS
February 15, 1940
My dear Zoe;
I am so glad that you have a place you love, with gardens and fountains, and that beautiful view of the mountain ridge. It always brings me peace to think that when the world is full of misery and madness, you can shut yourself up there and forget that the heritage of all the ages is being threatened. I have not succeeded in providing myself with such a retreat, and I realize that not to have done so is one kind of failure. For years and years an escape to a wild little island in the North Atlantic (with plenty of hardships, but absolute freedom) satisfied me absolutely. I love raw fogs and heavy storms from the sea better than a mild climate like yours—Oh, much better. But the hardships have grown to be a little more of a strain, and there is no way to “civilize” and modify the place without spoiling the very thing I love there.
Yes, I am glad you have a safe kingdom in this terrifying world. But, Zoe, I am not glad that you wrote Starvation on Red River. It is the only play of yours that I have ever read with no pleasure at all. I read it carefully, and I could not once detect your voice—it all sounded like something through a loud speaker. I don’t think you belong in the Dust Bowl. The characters just don’t come through to me as individuals; they seem made to fit certain situations. I cannot believe that a successful business man, a grown up man of the world, would ever find any pleasure in hiding a roll of money away in a niche where he used to put his pennies as a little boy. The situation which results from his doing such a thing, seems to me forced and improbable, as does the behaviour of the small boy, Harry.
No matter how many melodramatic situations a play flashes on one, I doubt whether it can have a very strong dramatic interest unless the audience can have a very strong personal interest, either admiration or affection, for at least one of the characters. Lately we have had ever so many plays which tried to get on without this, and they have none of them been good plays. “The Little Foxes” is the most recent example. Nobody cares a hang what happens to any of the characters in that shocking play—one would like to see the whole bunch massacred, so that one could go home. And in this play, from you of all people, I can’t find a single person who either you or I can
get worked up about. Pearl, least of all. She just doesn’t seem to me a real person. And the lion doesn’t seem to me a real lion. Why, pages of dialogue are wasted on that damned Lion!
What I am trying to say, Zoe, is that you were trying to write a play against your natural sympathies. I can’t help feeling that you hated writing it. So much of the dialogue is devoted to explaining and apologizing (accounting) for illogical situations; one action does not develop naturally out of another, and somehow the action never seems to go with the word. You never before wrote a play with no real feeling in it, and I hope to Heaven you never will again. Don’t do it, write your own kind of thing. Leave bloody lion tamers to skirts like Lillian Hellman. Please don’t be angry with me, but this play really hurt my feelings and made me sad.
Lovingly
Willa
On February 20, 1940, Greenslet wrote Cather about an unusual request: a book dealer in Utah would purchase a thousand copies of My Ántonia if a bull in the novel had its name changed from “Brigham Young” to something more suitable for a Utah readership.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
February 24 [1940]
My Dear F.G.
Why not Ferdinand? Seriously, I am willing to change the name of my bull to Andrew Jackson, for this edition of one thousand only. I do it as an accommodation to you. Not for five hundred dollars, but because you helped me to save “Antonia” from Grant Wood. Please, when you return from Florida, write me an agreement signed by yourself and another officer of the company, to the effect that the bull’s name is to be changed for 1,000 copies only. My father’s two bulls were named Gladstone and Brigham Young. I like both names—one refers to disposition (stubborn,) and the other to physical adequacy.
Here’s wishing you a pleasant vacation
Willa Cather
P.S. Of course I am in accord with you on the suggested proposal regarding the sale of a set of the autograph edition for the Finland fund.
W.S.C.
TO HELEN LOUISE CATHER
Easter Sunday, March 23, 1940
My Dear Goddaughter;
(How solemn that sounds!) I wanted to send you something in remembrance of the day when you are to be confirmed, having seen you through your baptism, but I couldn’t think of the right thing. Well one night I dreamed the right thing. I dreamed about you and your grandmother Cather on the upper front porch of Grandfather’s house. So the moment I was awake, the meaning of that very pleasant dream flashed into my mind. I got up immediately, went to the box where I keep my trinkets and took out a little marquise ring which Douglass gave mother long ago. When he came to New York six months before his death, he brought the ring to me. I had it cut down to fit my little finger and have often worn it. Marquise rings, unless they are very large ones with many stones, are usually worn on the little finger: Of course on the third finger when they are engagement rings. (verb understood, please!)
I know your Grandmother would want you to have this ring from her and from me, on this occasion. I want you to have something near you to remind you often of her. She loved you and Mary Virginia the best of her granddaughters. She used to tell me that you two did many thoughtful little things for her, and never seemed to think that it was silly for her to like pretty clothes just because she was old. How often I feel sad now because I always found something else to do when she wanted me to go to Mrs. Burden’s to “look at hats”. People can be very cruel in this world without meaning to be. I know she would want you to have her little ring as well as if she had told me so, and it gives me pleasure to send it to you. Sometime I will tell you some of the loving things she said to me about you.
Goodbye my dear, this is the first letter I have written by hand in many a long day. I think the Nicene Creed the most beautiful prose in the world. If I am wakeful in the night and think it through to myself, slowly, I can nearly always go to sleep. There is such authority and majesty in it.
Lovingly, my dear,
Your Aunt Willie
P.S. The ring will be too small for your little finger, perhaps. If so get Mr. Trickey (or his successor) to fit it properly and send the bill to me. The ring will reach you later than the letter, since registered packages are always long on the way.
Cather’s old friend Carrie Miner Sherwood was, along with her husband, involved with Red Cross fund-raising for Webster County, Nebraska.
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
June 5 [1940]
My Dear Carrie;
I think this a pretty heavy quota for Webster County under the present conditions, so I would like to make my contribution to the Red Cross fund as a citizen of Webster County. As I see that Walter [Sherwood] is treasurer I send my check to you. If it is turned in to the Red Cross solicitors, they will accept a check on the Chase Bank as cash.
I own land in Webster County and pay taxes there, so I should think I would be allowed to contribute my donation from there and help to bring the quota up to the stipulated amount.
I have been out of the French Hospital for nearly three weeks, but I am not very energetic. There was [nothing] very serious the matter—a sore throat that kept hanging edge of quinsy but never quite got there. You remember mother used to have those bad throat attacks. This was the first time for me. It made me think a lot about her.
Lovingly
Willie
P.S. I do not check on my account in Walter’s bank, because if my Chase Bank check is sent to the Red Cross Headquarters it will be returned to me and can be filed among my contribution checks for the Income Tax examiner. I’m writing indistinctly because I’m tired, my dear.
The Red Cross is the one charity I know that does what it pretends to.
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
Thursday [June 8, 1940]
Dear Carrie;
I forgot the most important thing—that I want my Red Cross check to be anonymous.
[Mary] Virginia said today she was afraid I’d made a blunder: that it would discourage others from contributing, and that persons who knew about it would say I was trying to show off. I think she meant her father [J. W. Auld] would.
Hastily
Willie
June 10, 1940, was “dreadful and discouraging” because, as Germany was overwhelming France and on the verge of taking Paris, Italy abandoned its neutrality and declared war on France and Great Britain.
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
June 10, 1940
Dear Ferris Greenslet:
Ever since the first number of John Buchan’s autobiography [Memory Hold-the-Door] came out in the Atlantic, I have wanted to tell you how fine I think it is and to congratulate you upon having secured such a book of sanity and comfort for us all. On this most dreadful and discouraging of days, June 10th, I had the chapter “Bright Company” for my companion at teatime. The world and life he brings before me seems almost as far away as the world of Vergil’s Eclogues. As you know, I have been blamed as an “escapist”,—indifferent and selfish. But there are things one cannot escape. And I think none of the personal sorrows I have lived through have ever shaken my days and nights as has the gloom (doom?) which has been gathering for the last few months over almost everything that has made the world worth living in or living for. You are one of the people who I know feels as I do; but the strange thing is that almost everyone feels it in some degree. My doctor tells me that the patients in the hospitals are very much affected by it, and their wish to get well seems to flag. He will not let me go over to Philadelphia on the 12th to take a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, because I am so slow in recovering from a recent illness. But I write chiefly to thank you for telling me about Buchan’s autobiography, which I might have missed when so many distracting and devastating things are happening in the world, and to all my friends abroad.
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. This seems a foolish personal request to make when I really care so little about personal things just now: but since Antonia is still selling, and since I am s
till perpetually receiving letters about her, I do wish you would send to the Riverside Press for a copy of the current edition. I lately sent for several, to present to my nurses at the French Hospital, and I was shocked to find on what poor, thin paper the book is now printed. The trouble is that since the letters on this page show through the paper and cloud the text on this page, the book is now very hard to read. I have always found that the principal objection to cheap editions, like the old Dent “Everyman” books, and the “Giants” of the Modern Library, is that one side of every leaf shows through the paper and clouds the next, so that there is not a clear page on which the eye can rest with satisfaction or read without a certain amount of disquieting effort.
W.S.C.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
July 11, 1940
My Dear Roscoe:
Yesterday I arrived home from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where I spent several week[s], trying to get over the results of a severe illness which I had in May. I was in the French Hospital for a week at that time. I did not write you because I did not wish to alarm you, and my doctor said it would be a slow recovery. I had accepted an invitation to take an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania June 12th, but I was too ill to go to Philadelphia. They gave me the degree in absentia, however. I have come back able to work steadily at my desk, which I have not been able to do for some time. I am determined that Alfred Knopf shall have this book (title Sapphira and the Slave Girl) this autumn. I have broken half a dozen dates with him, and I feel that it is a question of honor not to break another.
I wonder what I ever said that made you think I was ready to read proofs!! Why, when I went up to Jaffrey some weeks ago, two of the most important chapters were still unwritten. But there, in the quiet country, in my old attic rooms, I wrote them in two weeks time—worked two and one-half hours every morning, and stayed in bed all afternoon as my doctor had directed. But these chapters, scrawled in pencil, have to be rewritten several times before they are ready for the press and the whole story, which has been interrupted so many times, must be gone over and welded together, so to speak. The story was going strong and I was full of enthusiasm for it when Douglass died. After that I did not work any more at all for four months. Then Isabelle died. When I went back to the manuscript, I was almost a different person. I had lost my keen interest in the story. I have done all I can to mend that break in the story, and to make the latter part like the first, but the break will always be there.