by Willa Cather
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO MARY WILLARD
May 6, 1941
Dear Friend of Many Years,
It is bitter that I should be unable to write to you by hand. I have waited for some days to turn to you, because I seemed unable to utter anything but a cry of grief and bitter disappointment. Only Isabelle’s death and the death of my brother Douglass have cut me so deep. The feeling I have, all the time, is that so much of my life has been cut away. May [Willard] has been my friend since I was twenty years old. She was the first person who was kind to me in Pittsburgh, and the first person there whom I had the joy of admiring. She dated back at least two years before Isabelle, and was the most vital and vivid part of my early years there. But you know all these things. I don’t know why I am trying to tell you about them. As soon as I got Mr. Knapp’s letter, I asked Edith Lewis to telephone Ethel Litchfield for me, as gently as she could. But Ethel hung up the telephone: she couldn’t talk. That night, however, she called me and asked me please not to quit this world before she did. “I can’t go through it again, Willa, I simply can’t!” That was just what I had been feeling all day about Ethel herself. You see, that little group formed itself some years before you came to Pittsburgh, Marie—May and Ethel and Isabelle and I. We were all of us young then, and we melted together, as it were. People who came later were never a part of that very first design.
Later there was Cecil Sharpe and the glorious folk dancing period, when everybody seemed to recover their first youth. I was in New York then, working hard but, as you will remember, I went back to Isabelle for long visits, and used to attend the folk dancing classes. It seemed to me that all the dancers, men and women alike, really had taken a dip in the Fountain of Youth. Oh, those are beautiful days to remember! Isabelle often said that in the outdoor dances, May looked the youngest of them all and she was certainly by far the best dancer –––.
I haven’t seen Ethel since I talked with her over the telephone that night. We both felt that it was better not to meet. She has gone down to Washington to take care of her Dutch grandchildren for a time, and their importunate activities will engage her mind for the present, I hope.
My brother Roscoe, as I think I wrote May, is ill in a very small and very hot California town, Colusa. He had a heart lesion as a result of neglected angina. Two heart men have been procured from a distance. They have written me intelligent letters and the two best heart men here have had the details from them. They all agree that my brother should not see me before the first of June. I hope he will then be well enough to be moved to San Francisco with me.
I beg you, don’t try to answer this letter, Marie. Don’t even acknowledge it. I know that letters like this are painful to receive and yet, I know it is true that it helps one just a little to know that one’s old friends share one’s grief–––grief is a poor word anyhow; what I mean is that terrible sense of loss with which one wakens up in the morning and lies down at night. Something lost out of oneself and out of one’s world and out of the very air one breath[e]s.
All this winter when I have been literally helpless and often so discouraged about my right hand, just thinking about May and all the things we had to talk about together would brace me up a little. I love my brother Roscoe dearly, and I am longing to see him, but it was with May that I wanted to talk about all of the strange things that have happened in the world. That was the thing I looked forward to with joy.
With Love and Happy memories
Willa Cather
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ AND CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
May 16, 1941
Dear Irene and Carrie:
I wanted to write to both of you very often within the last few weeks, believing that Carrie is still in Chicago. I have been under great anxiety and stress since the middle of March. One of my oldest and dearest friends, of the Pittsburgh period, died suddenly in San Francisco. My brother Roscoe, since the first of March, has been in the hospital at Colusa with a very serious heart condition (angina pectoris), so severe that it caused a lesion in the heart muscle. The doctor in Colusa is not very intelligent, evidently, but he did call in a man from Marysville, of whom the best heart man in New York thinks very well. The local doctor, however, let Roscoe go for several months with a blood pressure of 220/120 before he called in any assistance. My doctors here think the eventual attack could have been averted, had the proper measures been taken earlier. I am sending you a copy of a letter from one of the older heart specialists here. This will make his case clear to you, and you will understand the dread and anxiety in which I have been living. I am going to Roscoe as soon as his doctors think wise—probably early in June. For the present they wish to avoid any emotion for him.
I think Elsie has not been informed as to the seriousness of Roscoe’s condition, and I am not sending her a copy of this letter. Indeed, I don’t wish anyone to know how serious Roscoe’s case is, except Carrie and Irene and Mary. Roscoe’s wife would rather Elsie did not know his actual condition, as she (Elsie) is very excitable and would probably go to see him immediately. His best chance for the time being is to avoid any emotional fluctuation.
During these last weeks I have so often thought of you two, and I often wished that I could enjoy with you the great exhibition of French paintings in Chicago. I felt sure that Irene would persuade Carrie to go to that exhibit with her. All the time that it was in New York I was unable to see it. Doctors and massage and the care of my right hand have taken all the time and strength I had. Like my poor brother, I have been under a pretty heavy emotional stress, and much of the time have been very tired. The letters which poured in after the publication of Sapphira have touched me very deeply. It is impossible to answer all of them, but I have tried to dictate appreciative replies to the letters from people who loved Douglass and from old friends of my father and mother.
I am sad to tell you that when I go West to Roscoe, I shall probably go from Montr[e]al, by the Canadian Pacific. My doctor can get special arrangements for me over that road. Miss Lewis will go with me, as I still wear a metal gauntlet, and must continue to wear it for several months. I cannot dress myself without help, and therefore could not travel alone. My hand is constantly improving, even though the gain is so slow. I now firmly believe that I shall be able to write again, though probably not using my hand in the old fashion—I have known other writers who worked with a penholder held between the first and two middle fingers in order to save the thumb. Sigrid Undset and the dear Menuhins have been bright spots in this trying time. Sometime, my dear Carrie, I want to tell you all about Madame Undset. She was here last night and spent the evening. Every time I see her she brings a large peace and relaxation. She is just all a great woman should be—and on a giant scale. She is a wonderful cook, a proficient scholar and has the literature of four languages at her fingers ends. There is nothing about wild flowers and garden flowers that she doesn’t know, and she is able to make plants thrive and bloom in her very humble and gloomy little hotel rooms. Besides all this, there is in the woman a kind of heroic calm and warmth that rises above all the cruel tragedies and loss of fortune that the last three years have brought. She simply surmounts everything that has been wrecked about her and stands large and calm;—she who has lost everything seems still to possess everything, and the small pleasures can still make her rather cold eyes glow with marvelous pleasure. She combines in herself the nature of an artist, a peasant, and a scholar. She is cut on a larger pattern than any woman I have ever known, and it rests me just to sit and look at the strength that stood unshaken through so much. Of course, of her son’s murder in a German concentration camp, she never speaks.
Good-bye, my darling friends. This is for the three of you, Mary and Irene and Carrie. I wish I could share with you the pleasure and support I have found in this undaunted exiled woman, as I wish I could share with you whatever else is good in my life.
With all the old love to the three of you,
Devotedly
Willie
P.S. What I write you about Madame Undset, of course, is confidential. She wouldn’t like me to advertise her, even in praise. She is self-sufficient, and would never think of trying to make a good impression on anybody. But I want you three to share with me the pleasure of realizing someone who is so meticulous about her cookery and her scholarship, and whom the German Army could not break.
When the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940, Undset was forced to flee her home. The elder of her two sons died that same month, and she had also lost her daughter to illness shortly before the war.
TO ROSE ACKROYD
May 16, 1941
My dear Mrs. Ackroyed:
Your letter has awakened many pleasant memories. Your grandmother, Mary Ann Anderson, was a very special favorite of mine when I was a little girl of five to eight years old and lived at Willow Shade on the Northwestern Turnpike. When I was shut up in the house with colds, I used to watch out of the front windows, hoping to see Mrs. Anderson coming down the road. My family usually sent some word to her when I was sick, because she was so tactful and understanding with a child.
Years after we moved West, when I graduated from college, I went immediately back to visit my great-aunt, Mrs. [Sidney] Gore. At that time I had several happy meetings with Mary Ann Anderson. She came down to Auntie Gore’s to see me, and I several times walked up that beautiful Hollow Road, up to Timber Ridge, to see her in her little house where she lived all alone, and where she was as happy as the day was long. She had a most unusual interest, you understand, in following the story of peoples’ lives and knowing everything that happened to them. She got great pleasure out of other peoples’ good luck, and was deeply sympathetic when they had bad luck. At this time I was twenty-one years old, but of course I remembered all the people I knew in my childhood. Mary Ann and I talked for hours at a time, and she would tell me all about what became of the people whom I remembered—how they lived, if they were still alive, and how the older people had ended their days.
Your Aunt Marjorie [Anderson] and your Uncle Enoch [Anderson] both went to Nebraska with us. Enoch was with us for two years and then, when my father decided to leave the farm, he and two boys from Winchester went to California to hunt work in the big wheat fields there. He once sent us a picture of himself driving a big threshing machine, but after that we never heard of him. Your Aunt Marjorie died in 1928. She was in our family continuously after we left Virginia until the day of her death. She was greatly beloved by all of us,—children and grandchildren. Her love of children was one of her outstanding qualities. I have lived in New York for thirty years, but while my parents were living I went home for long visits, at least every other summer. I used always to spend many happy hours with Marjorie in the big sunny kitchen or on the shady back porch. She liked to talk about old times in Virginia, and my father always told her the news that came in the weekly Winchester paper. I shall always remember those hours with Marjorie on the shady back porch or in the sunny kitchen with especial pleasure. She died from a short illness in the autumn of 1928, when I was in New England. She is buried in our family lot in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
I have had many pleasant letters since the publication of “Sapphira and the Slave Girl”, but few of them have called up so many happy memories as yours, which brought once more my dear Mary Ann Anderson to my mind. How glad I would be to have the croup again, if I could watch out of one of those windows at Willow Shade and see Mrs. Anderson coming briskly around the turn of the road! Here is a photograph lately taken of all that is left of the once beautiful Willow Shade, and I have marked a circle around the window where I used to sit to watch for my dear Mrs. Anderson coming down the road.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. The real name of the woman who wove our carpets was Mrs. Kearns, but there may have been a Mrs. Cowper also.
[Included is this appended note:] Miss Cather asks me to explain that the signature affixed to this letter is genuine but unlike her natural signature. Because of an accident to her right hand. It is still in splints and she can make only a very poor attempt with her left hand.
S. J. Bloom, Secretary
TO ROSCOE CATHER
September 17, 1941
New York City
My dear Roscoe:
This must be a love letter, short and sweet. I have been down to the French Hospital for a week getting over some of the shocks and difficulties of the trip home, and the unpleasant surprise that very extensive and noisy repairs were going on in our apartment house.
When I was packing my bags to come down here I threw in one of my six copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I always carry a copy of the Sonnets about with me. I memorized most of them many years ago and when I occasionally forget a line, I like to have the text at hand so that I can look it up quickly. The copy which I happened to bring down here I had not opened or even seen for many years. It turned up by chance. When I was looking up something in it yesterday, I noticed this blank end-page. The writing on it set me thinking. I must have carried this same book when you and I went to Dale Creek Canyon [in Wyoming] on a “pass” so many years ago! I remember we rode home on the rear platform of some little passenger train. It was a very starry night and fairly chilly, but we sat out there and wondered about the future and how we could ever manage to hang together, and make a living in a world which seemed to [be a] good deal like a greased pole, or a huge slippery glass sphere—so slippery that one might slip into space at any moment—we seemed to have no way of hanging on to it, really.
This little end-page brought that time and its perplexities back to me very vividly. You and Douglass and I felt awfully responsible for the younger brothers and sisters, didn’t we? We surely wanted to help.
Well, we have managed to hang on to the slippery globe a good while, and we have had our compensations as well as our disappointments.
Roscoe, my dear boy, I won’t nag at you and I won’t fuss over you, but I do think you ought to consider me a little bit and be careful. In so far as I am concerned, you are absolutely the only bit of family I have left. You are the only one who goes back and understands. I love all the nieces, to be sure, but that is quite [a] different matter. You are the only prop I’ve got.
Lovingly
Willie
[Enclosed is a blank end page from a book with the following written on it.]
Dale Creek Canon, Wyo
Summit of the Rockies
August 30, 1898 XXIX
The “XXIX” on the end paper is a reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.
TO ROSE ACKROYD
December 27, 1941
My dear Mrs. Ackroyd:
I got many lovely Christmas gifts and Christmas cards, but yours is the only one that brought tears to my eyes. Of course, I shall keep it and love to have it, and I thank you very much for it. What a wonderful old face! She is older here than when I saw her last. I know that chiefly because her hair is so much thinner, but the eyes have all their old fire. In the time of my first memories of her, she had the most wonderful reddish auburn hair, so wavy that it was almost crinkly. And her skin, too, was brown, or had
a brownish shade. I think it is very kind of you to send me this photograph. You must have realized from my letter that I was very fond of dear Mrs. Anderson.
Your Uncle Snowden, too, I remember very distinctly. I do not wonder that he was your favorite uncle. There was something very fine about Snowden. I always liked to see him. Once, when I was about five years old and somebody had driven Marjorie and me up to your grandmother’s house on Timber Ridge, a violent rainstorm came up. Marjorie and I were supposed to walk home, because the road was downhill all the way. Marjorie had stout shoes, but I wore little slippers. Snowden came up from his house on the Hollow Road, on a gray horse, and took me home in front of him, holding the reins with one hand and keeping his other arm around me to steady me on the old cavalry saddle. He had on an old gray Confederate overcoat, which I suppose had been his father’s. I remember how contented and safe I felt. Children know when people are honest and good. They don’t reason about it, they just know.
Thank you again, dear Mrs. Ackroyd, for this photograph of that dear old face. I shall keep it as long as I live, and I only wish such a photograph had come to us while my mother was still living. She would have loved to see it.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
With the following letter to the Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, Cather included a clipping from the Red Cloud Commercial Advertiser, January 5, 1942, which quotes Bob Smith’s cable to his father: “Just arrived from Kunming. Came through both battles of Rangoon safely. Knocked down four ships personally. Happy New Year.”
TO SIGRID UNDSET
Saturday [January 24, 1942]
Dear Sigrid Undset;
I hope this will reach you on Sunday morning. I have been thinking about you a great deal because I have just read a book I had not seen before. The translation appeared in ’37 [actually 1935], and I was in France all that year. I believe the title in the original is Elleve Aar [published in English as The Longest Years]. There are many things in it I would like to ask you about. In one thing I surpassed you: I could sew quite well when I was seven!!