by Willa Cather
Among the many letters I found waiting for me when I got back from Jaffrey, I find one from Margaret, and I shall communicate with her just as soon as I can. She has no telephone, so I must wait until I have time to write a letter and make an appointment. I have not unpacked my trunk, but today I began my new schedule by working two hours, and I intend to do this every day until the book is ready for Alfred Knopf. I am going to get this book done if I have to stay in town with it all summer. If you read my sketch about Alfred Knopf in the book I sent you [“Portrait of the Publisher as a Young Man,” in Alfred A. Knopf Quarter Century], you may understand why I feel this way. The sketch gave no hint of the thousand personal kindnesses I have had from him, or of his constant interest in my comfort and welfare. It’s a matter of honor with me not to disappoint him by delaying this book again. If I can get it done in time to go to Grand Manan, I can of course read the proofs there. But the proofs are still a long way ahead. Mary Virginia always helps me a lot when she is in town—does bits of shopping, etc., for me—but she is away on her vacation for one month. There are other difficult features in the situation, but I am certainly going to finish this book before I leave town, unless some serious accident should befall me.
Now forgive me for telling all my troubles. The results of a high blood pressure are sometimes terribly hard to bear. The thing I mind most is a kind of clouded memory, especially regarding very recent happenings, engagements etc. You know, I used to have a real good memory.
Lovingly
Willie
P. S. The letters from my friends in France and England are heartbreaking. Those letters alone would be enough to take all the drive out of one.
July 12th
Your letter about the State of California vs. the Ocean Front just reached me. I’m sorry you had to write it, but I certainly call it a well composed letter—you made this technical tangle as clear as it can be made. I’m sure I don’t know what a process server could do to me. If he starts to drag me to some court or other just now, he won’t get me very far. Too bad I didn’t get off to G. Manan some weeks ago. He’d have had some chase finding me!
I love to think of your happy family reunion, dear brother.
W
TO ROSCOE CATHER
August 26 [1940]
My Dear Roscoe;
What a darling granddaughter you have! Tell dear Elizabeth that everyone at Whale Cove Cottage is delighted to see a picture of her little daughter and they send their love to her.
Last week I wrote the last chapter of “Sapphira and the Slave Girl” (It had been hand-written three times before, but this time I copied it off on the machine in final form) and telegraphed Knopf. I enclose his reply, which you may mail back to me.
“Sapphı˘ra” is pronounced with a short “i”, as in Madeira, Zamira etc. It is not the Bible “Sapphı¯ra” with long “i”, but an old English name made from the Bible name with the “i” made short.
I will write you when I get back to a comfortable typewriter. The old one I keep up here year after year is the same old machine I bought for $30.00 in Cheyenne that summer I was there with you and Douglass (we got it from a fellow who was dead broke, you remember. All my early books were typed on it.) I always write a book through the first time by hand. This book I have written twice by hand—some chapters of it three and even four times. It is technically the most difficult book I ever wrote, and it has had very hard luck. I’ve tried an experiment in form which most people will not like, and which, I admit, rather gives the show away. The fact (which only a very few people will notice) is that in this case there is a concealed show behind the first show. This second show, coming on the stage in the Epilogue, is the reason for, and the authority for, the first show. Without that literal account of something that happened to me when I was between five and six years old, the whole book would be constructed, not lived, like a hundred other stories of the South and of slavery: the old costumes, the old high-stepping language and “mansions”, the old Uncle Remus dialect. This is true Virginia negro speech, which was much modified “Uncle Remus” talk. When I began the story that speech was in my brain like a phonograph record. I hadn’t a moment’s hesitation. Half-way through the story I went South to verify it. Not with a note-book my ear is my notebook—it is the only one I have ever carried.
Please save this scrawl until you read the book. I have not written a word of comment or explanation to anyone else about the book. You are the only one in my family who cares a damn. I never used to mind that, but as one grows older one wishes there were some one of one’s blood kin who was deeply interested. However, better no one than the wrong kind like those poor D. H. Lawrence left behind him. [James M.] Barrie and Thomas Hardy, thank God, left no “representatives” but their own books,—and that is best. You can’t keep your cake and eat it too.
I’m tired, so I’m writing foolishness—so excuse
Lovingly
W
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
August 29 [1940]
Grand Manan Island
My Dear Alfred;
I did not write you until I had something definite to report. Living on our island was never so perplexing and inconvenient as it has been this summer. I will report my amusing misadventures when I see you. Miss Bloom’s vacation came at the worst possible time for me. She will not be in New York until the Tuesday after Labor Day.
However, within a few days I shall be able to send you the rest of the manuscript, all of it except one chapter, the insert chapter of about 3,700 words which follows this page of your manuscript. That insert is completed, and I will send it to Miss Bloom to copy as soon as she returns. I will ask her to do it as quickly as possible and hold it until my return for my final corrections. That chapter has a good deal of interesting dialect and native idiom, and I want to go over her copy of it before I give it to you. I will do this as soon as I reach New York on September 17th or 18th. You would surely have the corrected copy on the 20th.
I am leaving the island earlier than I expected, because the cook (a mighty poor one!) is going then.
I am taking the sketch for the jacket to the post office today, as a boat goes out tomorrow—the first boat out for two days. I like this design, though I really like Mr. [Rudolph] Ruzicka’s more conservative style better than this rather violent departure from his usual manner. This is confidential, I would not admit it to anyone else.
Please mail me a bunch of the reviews of Thomas Mann’s long awaited “Return” [The Beloved Returns]. It’s a great book, of course, if you approach it from the right angle, but how many of our esteemed fellow citizens have ever read Goethe, even in translation? And what will the author’s complete saturation with his subject mean to those who haven’t read Werther or Wilhelm? I wonder how many of “pure Nordics” of the present Germany have read them?
I never thanked you for the wine you sent me just before I left town—I didn’t even open the package. It was not ingratitude but heat that made me so ill-mannered. It was 99 degrees on the day Miss Lewis and I left town.
Thank you for ordering the candy, which I hope will come on tonight’s boat.
With love to you both
Willa Cather
TO BISHOP GEORGE ALLEN BEECHER
September 28, 1940
My Bishop and my very dear Friend:
You never had a kinder impulse than that which led you to write me a beautiful letter about the dedication of the altar rail at Grace Church. This letter, which I will keep all my life, brought tears to my eyes and peace to my heart. There are few spots in the world that I love as much as I love that little church in Red Cloud. And when I read your letter, I feel that I am there myself. I know that to me, too, the windows would speak like voices, and many precious memories would come back to me. How well I remember the evening when you confirmed me, with my father and mother, in that dear little church. That evening meant a great deal in the lives of all three of us.
It seems almost like one of the miracle
s of old that dear Molly Ferris was able to be present at that service and once more bear witness to her “faith that has been a light to many.” I feel grateful, my dear Bishop, that in your busy life you took the time to write me of that Sunday service while your heart was still full of it. Your good letter brought to my heart an uplift and a warmth which could express itself only in prayer. I felt as if I had been with you all on that happy day.
It will not be long, I hope, before I am with you in person as well as in thought. I feel very hopeful that I can be in Red Cloud and Hastings sometime this coming winter, and then I can explain to you some of the many things which have kept me away so long.
With loving good wishes to Mrs. Beecher and yourself,
Faithfully and affectionately yours,
Willa Cather
Sapphira and the Slave Girl was designated a “main selection” of the Book-of-the-Month Club in January 1941, which meant large sales for the novel.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
October 5, 1940
My dear Roscoe:
Before I left Grand Manan I wrote you a rather hysterical letter, and I am ashamed of it. Please forget it and forgive me. Sometimes, at the end of a long pull of work, people get shaky and wonder what it is all about. Unfortunately, I had a severe toothache nearly all the while I was up there, and with our queer boat service I would have lost a whole week getting to a dentist on the mainland and returning. I had only six weeks to finish the book, and could not lose a week. The local doctor gave me codeine when my sleep was too badly broken up, but codeine leaves a mean hang-over. On the whole it was a fairly nerve-racking experience. I got the book done, however, and apparently with considerable success.
In these days any kind of success brings its own problems. I am enclosing a letter from Alfred Knopf which will explain some of them to you.
The Book of the Month Club (their selection of the book for January has not been publicly announced and is a secret) will make their payment to both Alfred and me at the end of January. I always make up my income tax from January 1 to January 1. Mr. [Joseph] Lesser, in Alfred’s office, does it for me. I have been four years writing the book and most of the financial returns will come in during the year 1941, when the tax on what is called “unearned income” is to be greatly increased. You see, Alfred has taken the trouble to worry about that, and is willing to advance me half of what the Book of the Month Club pays, in order to get that amount into my 1940 tax return. I had been thinking rather mournfully of the income tax problem that would confront me next year, but I had not spoken to him about it.
I have in my safe deposit box a letter received from you some time before I went away for the summer. In this letter you said that you had a check for me from the Ocean Front Oil property, but that you were holding all such checks to use in some litigation with the State of California. If, without any injustice to the other participants to whom checks are due, you could send me my check before the first of December, it would certainly help me out very much in my tax report, by increasing my income for this year (this year it (my income) happens to be lower than it has been for many years) and reducing it for 1941, when it will be larger than it has ever been before in any one year. Knopf never made as big a first printing as he is making for Sapphira. The next largest first printing was of Shadows on the Rock, which the Book of the Month Club had also accepted. As you probably know, the Book of the Month Club makes its own books. It simply buys from the author and publisher the right to print the book in their own cheap way, and send it to the subscribers. They cut into Alfred Knopf’s sale somewhat, but he feels that the wide advertisement they give the book fully compensates. Moreover, the Book of the Month Club members are made up of people who practically never buy books—they want something to read but don’t know how to go about getting it. As Alfred says, very few of the members are in my “natural audience” at all.
God knows, my dear brother, why such a quiet book, dealing with old fashioned people and the long ago, should set a bunch of young men like the office staff on fire, but it seems to have done so. The form (structure) of the book is fairly good, but the Epilogue and the approach to it are pretty daring, and I was very much afraid it would give the reader a jolt. Fortunately, I wrote the Epilogue before I wrote beyond the first few chapters of the book—I like to see my end from my beginning. That was before Douglass died and before Isabelle died, and I was full of enthusiasm for my idea. Every word in the scene of Nancy’s Return is true, my boy, even the weather. The excitement of that actual occurrence seemed to change me from a baby into a thinking being. For years I had wanted to write that actual scene, but I could never see a way to use it except in a personal autobiography, and I hate autobiographies.
With my love
Willie
P.S. I am sending you a copy of a letter to Elsie, which will explain some of the problems which puzzle me at present, quite as much as the income tax! I’m only half way through the page proofs.
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
October 14, 1940
[Written in the top margin:] Confidential
My dear Dorothy:
I wish I could write you just a note by hand, but my right hand is in a bandage just at present (sprains). Now at last, my dear Dorothy, we are quits about titles. I have always been ashamed that I called your last book “Seasoned Wood” [really Seasoned Timber]! You see, I had left the book at Grand Manan, where I have a considerable library, and I was writing from memory. Now you write me about “Sapphira and the Slave Maid”! my dear, which is “Sapphira and the Slave Girl”. You see, I like the doubling up of s’s and r’s, just as you like “timber” better than “wood”.
It gives me very special pleasure, my dear Dorothy, to know that you really like the book, though you must have read some very incomplete version of it, for I am just handing back the galley proofs of one chapter which I brought down from Grand Manan with me, and the galley proofs of the rest of the text were unusually slovenly. Douglass and Isabelle died when I was in the middle of the book, and I threw it aside for nearly a year. When I picked it up again, I had not much enthusiasm left. However, I had written the Epilogue before that break—because the Epilogue was where I was going. I think it is bad manners to jump from the third person to the first person in a narrative, but that meeting between Nancy and Aunt Till, which took place just as I tell it, was one of the most moving things that ever happened to me when I was little. And it was from the long talks between my grandmother and Till and Nancy, that I got my strongest impressions of how things had been in the old days before the War. This grandmother was really a “Rebel”, since she lost two sons in the Confederate Army. But she was a lover of justice. In a beautiful old map in the Society Library, made in 1821, I found the actual ferry by which my grandmother took Nancy over the Potomac River. My father’s people were all “Republicans”, and the post-mistress was my great-aunt, Sidney Gore, born Sidney Cather.
I cannot tell you how much pleasure I had in listening to those voices which had been non-existent for me for so many years, when other sounds silenced them. I loved especially playing with the darkey speech, which was deep down in my mind exactly like phonograph records. I could remember exactly what they said and the quality of the voice. Just wait till our wise young reviewers, such as Clifton [Fadiman] and Louis [Kronenberger], sadly call attention to the inconsistency in Till’s and Nancy’s speech,—never knowing that all well trained house servants spoke two languages: one with white people and one with their fellow negroes. But when they were very much excited or in sorrow, they nearly always reverted to the cabin idiom.
Once I had dropped the book for good. It was only after this unspeakable war began that I took it up again. I am an “escapist”, you know, and by this means I could truly escape for two hours every day,—from the newspapers, and the letters from my friends in London which shattered my nerves,—not by their complaints but by their sheer splendour.
Good-bye and thank you, dear Dorothy. I
expect I should have put off writing to you until my hand was well, but so many things crowd in nowaday, that one is almost afraid to wait.
Yours always,
Willa
TO FERRIS GREENSLET
Sunday [probably November 25, 1940]
Dear F.G.
Despite coincidental misfortunes (secretary out of town and the thumb of my right hand badly sprained), I must venture a scrawl to tell you what deep pleasure the letter from you and Mrs. Greenslet gives me. I prefer to think it is from both of you—indeed, you practically say so. The rush of Virginia memories, when once I began to call them up, was heavy upon me. I wrote many chapters of Virginia ways and manners, just as things came back to me, for the relief of remembering them in a time of loss and personal sorrow. That “eased” me, and comforted. Then I cut what was too solidly “manners and customs” and re-wrote the story according to the design I had in mind when I wrote the first chapter—a pleasant breakfast table, and incidental discussion of disposing of a gentle and affectionate girl—(not slave girl really, but a member of the family). The real Nancy’s real mother was a real member of my family when I was little. The stories about that strange relation (those I have happened to read) were all so partisan for or against. The institution was neither a torture prison, nor a benevolent training school. It had its pleasant domestic surfaces. Underneath? Well, “down with us” we didn’t think much about the underneath. Aunt Till was no pitiable figure to me—nor to herself. Dignity, personality!