by Willa Cather
Since Christmas life has been full of people and events—many old friends from the West in town.
I was pleased when I read that a Nebraska boy had brought down four Jap planes on Christmas day. When I found he was Bob Smith, from my own little town of 1200 people, a lad with whom my nieces went to school, I felt more than pleased. I like his cable to his father. I like “personally”—nice little adverb, nothing showy about it.
We have millions of boys like Bob, but not in big cities.
The Western friends who storm New York every year in mid-winter, will soon be going home and I hope that you can come to us for a long evening.
Devotedly yours
Willa Cather
The following to Roscoe was written after several long, exasperated letters to him about the bothersome behavior of their siblings, especially their sister Elsie.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
April 22, 1942
My dearest Brother:
Aren’t we a pair to draw to? Just as soon as I heard that you were sitting up, I myself retired to a hospital. I don’t fail to see the humor of it, however. I am getting out from under now, and yesterday boldly went forth and had my hair washed with no ill effects. When we first heard that you were ill, pretty much everything went wrong. Edith had various woes and I have various woes, but now we are both getting straightened out.
A long time ago you wrote me such a dear letter trying to explain Elsie’s erratic conduct. In that letter you struck off a great sentence. My mind has vibrated with it ever since. You said: “We must take each other as we are.” That doesn’t sound very profound, but it is profound. If all families lived up to it there would be a good deal more peace in the world. I really think the Miner family have lived up to it. But ever since I got that letter I have been ever so much nearer, and more tolerant, to all my kin.
Jack wrote me such kind and comforting letters while you were ill. Indeed, Jack was never at fault. It was I who was at fault, because I dragged him into a kind of world that he was not fitted for. I did that not so much because I was ambitious for him (this is really true), but because he was at that time very unhappy at home. Jim and Ethel were both using him like a little hired boy. Jim was building a house for himself on the Crowell place, and Jack was doing all the work—pretty heavy physical work. This is just a word of explanation because I remember I spoke to you rather hardly of Jack. I do not feel that way now, and I never shall again.
I expect you are finding, just as I do, that getting well is rather slow and tedious work. There are lots of friends here whom I would like to see, but haven’t yet the strength to see people, so I have made a game of having my four o’clock tea every afternoon with Winston Churchill! I don’t think there is anybody on earth who knows better how to get every possible pleasure out of every single day, from his first egg at breakfast to his last highball at night. I find that an imaginary tea with him, meditating on his unfailing buoyancy, really does me a great deal of good. I am sending you a little book which I got from the British Library of Information, and I hope it will amuse you as much as it has amused me. His speeches are too long and too many for me to remember, but these little extracts from the speeches one can remember—and the mere vitality of them helps me along.
My dearest love to you both
Willie
TO MARGARET CATHER SHANNON
October 16 [1942]
Williams Inn, Williamstown, Massachusetts
My Dear Little Margaret;
I have been here now for one week. Quiet college town—nothing but college and houses, no shops. One has to go to North Adams to buy anything.
Good hotel, good food and wonderful milk; from cows not from the grocer’s! I hope to pick up a few pounds. All food has been hateful to me since July 24th, but here I get really hungry and want my dinner.
I haven’t heard from your father for many weeks. Sometimes I worry and am afraid he may be ill. Meta has never written me since I have been a “post-operative”. I wish she would. Yesterday I walked half a mile in the lovely autumn sunshine and was very much encouraged.
I am registered here as
Winifred Carter (CARTER)
Horrid name, but all feminine names beginning with W are horrid. In a college town I can’t very well use my own name—this is an all-year-open in[n] and a dozen of the Professors live here. This hotel sits right in the campus. The students are just back. One nice senior caught me studying the stained glass in the chapel. He asked if I were not I in such a nice way that I admitted it. He promised not to give me away, and I’m really sure he won’t.
Please let Winifred Carter know how you are, dear. I have no Miss Bloom here, and I shan’t write letters until I rise above one hundred and ten pounds—ridiculous weight for me!
Lovingly
Your Aunt Willie
or
Winnie!!
TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
December 5, 1942
Dear Alexander Woollcott:
I, too, have very lately come out of a hospital, and it was not the French hospital. That it was not my favorite hospital, was due to the fact that Dr. Allen Whipple decided to rob me of my gall bladder, and he operates nowhere on earth except at the Presbyterian Hospital—and in Rome, I believe!
I am grateful to you for the letter from the Nolan family which you enclosed. Oh, I think there are thousands of families like the Nolans in America, and many boys like Robert B! I am glad that he found a church and “served Holy Mass in the small mission chapel”. I am not a Catholic, but I do believe that when young people are held together by something which we might call “spiritual”, they make better citizens and better friends.
Now for the chief point in your letter. If you and I were sitting at a table in your study discussing the matter of the proposed anthology for young soldiers, I think we should try to put ourselves back to our eighteenth or nineteenth year and try to remember what we really liked to read then—what we read from pleasure, not from duty.
You ask me whether I think anything of Miss Jewett’s should go into such an anthology. When I was nineteen, I was not in the least interested in Miss Jewett. I found nothing in her stories that I wanted from a book. I was blind alike to their elegance and their truthfulness. At that age I was reading Balzac furiously, and reading everything of Tolstoy’s that had been translated. Very young people don’t care a hang about anything between the covers of a book but one thing—vitality. Young people, even those who are destined to become more or less critical in their tastes, are hungry to read about “life” and about characters who are in the midst of the struggle. They don’t care at all how a thing is done; refinement simply goes over their head, form doesn’t mean anything. They like high color, they like to be “thrilled”, and they want excitement in a book. I am speaking now of young people with intelligence and the rudiments of taste. It is my honest conviction that Miss Jewett, much as I admire her, would have no proper place in such an anthology as you are making.
Oh, I could tell you a lot about what to keep out of your anthology! But when I try to suggest what you might put in, I seem to face a pretty blank wall. I cannot see many “American classics” which would not be cold comfort for lively young Americans in a foreign land. Nearly all the “classics” are too mild, and so many of the new books are too “strong” and are passionately devoted to the ugliness and baseness of American life. Strange to say, I think we come out rather better in poetry than in prose. There are lots of country boys who have a shy liking for some of Longfellow’s ballads and who take “The Building of the Ship” seriously. Many American boys like to read the younger Robert Frost—“A Boy’s Will” and “North of Boston”. “The Death of the Hired Man”, for example. I have known a great many young people who loved verses in “A Boy’s Will”.
I am greatly pleased that you liked “Sapphira”, and I am especially pleased that you liked the last chapter. Many people didn’t. But in this book my end was my beginning: the place I started out fr
om. I don’t really know whether I was five years old or six years old when Nancy came back to us from Canada, but the event was so important to me that all through my life, whenever I happened to remember it, I found a little echo of the thrill that went through me when she entered the room where her old mother and my grandmother and I were all waiting for her. That chapter is an unornamented and literally truthful account of Nancy’s return–––and the afternoons I used to spend in the big kitchen where Nancy and Till and my grandmother discussed almost everything that had happened since Nancy went away, are among the happiest hours I can remember.
Always faithfully and admiringly yours,
Willa Cather
P.S. I almost think that if I were making an “Anthology” for American soldiers, I would make a neat edition of Huckleberry Finn, and let it go at that! Thousands of them have never read it, and the thousands who have read it will read it with a different feeling in a foreign land. Times have changed, I know. But anyhow, I think it is still the most American of any.
TO MR. PHILLIPSON
March 15, 1943
Dear Mr. Phillipson:
The high school teacher whom you mention must have been more than “sensitive and kindly”; she evidently had a feeling for sound sentence structure. I get hundreds of letters from college students, friendly and enthusiastic, but the weakness of their sentence structure is often appalling. They seem convinced that friendly and enthusiastic clauses need have no particular relation to each other or to the main stem of the sentence. Sometimes these letters show insight and a real feeling for literature. But how can these boys expect to play sonatas when they cannot play scales? I am chiefly interested in your letter because you seem to have a feeling for the English sentence. In writing, that is the beginning of everything.
You ask me about “Paul’s Case”. I once had in my latin class a nervous, jerky boy who was always trying to make himself “interesting”, and to prove that he had special recognition and special favours from members of a stock company then playing in the town theater. You will recognize one part of Paul. The other part of Paul is simply the feeling I myself had about New York City and the old Waldorf Astoria (not the horrid structure which now stands on Park Avenue), when I first left college and was teaching latin in the Pittsburgh High School. I used to come to New York occasionally then, and that is the way the City seemed to me. Of course, I never ran away, or jumped under a railway train: neither did the real Paul, in so far as I know. But that is the way stories are usually made—a grafting of some outside figure with some part of the writer’s self.
You speak of a “universal longing for a world beautiful”. In the first place, this longing is by no means universal. It is rather exceptional. And don’t, please, speak of a “world beautiful”! That is the only bad phrase in your letter. But it is bad. It is what I call “women’s club phraseology”. You could have said that better, had you tried. But a desire for beauty—a strong desire—is the important thing, is the real gift. And it is a blessed gift which cannot be altogether thwarted or starved, because there is beauty everywhere. I have never stayed in Rochester, but I have been through it, on the train, in the winter-time, and I thought the snow-covered country around it glorious. If you will ask at the public library for a book of mine called “The Song of the Lark”, you will find out how I feel about this desire which is so hard to name. Rebecca West calls it “the strange necessity”. If one has that desire, no circumstances can keep him from the treasure house of the world. All the great literature and the great music and the great art are his. As much of these things, I mean, as his desire can reach. And after all, we deserve only what we can reach—though the process of reaching it may be slow.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO MISS MASTERTON
March 15, 1943
My dear Miss Masterton:
What a delightful letter you wrote me! My secretary has just asked me why it was such a delightful letter; the only answer to that is that there was a delightful person behind the letter. If you had to read such hundreds of letters as I have to read every year—letters from people entirely unknown to me, you would acquire a fortune teller’s mystic skill in reading personality. When I get a real human letter like yours, it is just as if a charming person came into the room and sat down and began to talk to me.
I seem fated to send people on journeys. Not long ago I had a letter from a Boston schoolteacher who was started for Quebec by a sentence in “Shadows on the Rock”. As for the number of people who have gone a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop—well, the managers of the Harvey House system have repeatedly invited me to come and stay at the Bishop’[s] Lodge indefinitely, as their guest! The great disadvantage about writing of the places you love is that you lose your beloved places forever—that is, if you are a quiet person who doesn’t like publicity. I have not been back to Virginia since Sapphira was published, nor to Quebec since “Shadows on the Rock” was published, nor to New Mexico since the Archbishop was written,—except on the train. I have been through New Mexico many times on the train, for that is the country I love best.
Isn’t the part of Virginia beyond Timber Ridge and the Capon River lovely? Such simple, honest, earnest people live there. It would have been the same forever if motor cars had never been invented. I was actually present when they were tearing to pieces the Double S road leading from the village of Gore up to the top of Timber Ridge. It was the most beautiful piece of country road that I have ever found anywhere in the world. I never found anything in the Swiss or Italian Alps so beautiful as that road once was.
I am sorry you saw that desolate ruin [the house Willow Shade, near Gore, Virginia] which forty years ago was such a beautiful place, with its six great willow trees, beautiful lawn, and the full running creek with its rustic bridge. It was turned into a tenement house long since, and five years ago the very sight of it made me shiver. Of course, it still lives in my mind, just as that March day when Nancy came back still lives in my mind. Even her dress is described in more detail than I could ever remember about any dress I saw last week. She was just exactly like that, and old Till was just like that. I was between five and six years old when the return happened, and it was the most exciting event in my life up to that time. I had heard so much about Nancy, and my mother often sang me to sleep with that old song. Mrs. Blake was my grandmother [Rachel Elizabeth Seibert Boak], and she really took Nancy across the Potomac. Well, those were old times, but they were beautiful.
I am so glad you are a Scotch woman. I have always loved the Scotch, in Canada as well as abroad.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO META AND ROSCOE CATHER
noon, Tuesday [March 23, 1943]
Dear Meta and Roscoe;
I’ve seen him, all right! Though his dear little [mother] hasn’t. He [Richard Shannon] is now almost 24 hours old. I don’t know why the nurse had pity on me, but she waylaid me after I had spent nearly an hour with Margaret, took me down the hall, and brought him to the closed door of his little glass house. He was not red, just rosy, wide awake, and he gave me the once-over, deliberately. He’s an individual, just as I am an individual—a trifle less experienced. I don’t know his name. You see I didn’t meet him until I left Margaret; then he was not an individual, and I didn’t feel interested in his name. The mere abstract idea of grand-nieces and nephews does not violently appeal to one who dislikes getting old.
Margaret looked just like herself, and I loved being with her once again. I think she’d like to see her baby. I shall patent a crib enclosed in glass, so that babies can be wheeled in for their mothers to look at them, even if the intimacy goes no further.
Love and Congratulations to you both
Willie
TO DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
March 31 [1943]
Dear Dorothy;
The Yale Review is the one magazine I do get regularly; because, as your old Ver
monter said, it doesn’t come “too reg’elar”. I had read your article (excuse new pen) before the copy you sent me arrived, and I wanted to write you about it. But what is there to say? What is there to say about anything that is happening now? There is no spot on the earth’s surface that one can rest one’s mind against any more. I knew you had many ties in France and I have often wanted to write to you. But again, what is there to say? Besides, I got a little behind with life, I allowed the celebrated Doctor [Allen] Whipple to “remove”, no, to take out, my appendix and gall bladder last July. August and September were nasty months to recover in: horrible heat, and the humidity of Singapore. Bad news from every quarter of the world always pouring in. I got so behind in my correspondence, in normal vitality, in weight (16 pounds) that I thought I could never catch up again. Slowly one comes to life again—but one wonders why, when most of the world one loved is being destroyed and so many of the friends one loved have been destroyed. We wont live to see the beautiful new world they talk about emerge. We see only a thousand years of glorious endeavour wrecked and wiped out. Anyhow, I don’t want to live in the new world they promise me—it’s not to my taste.
Affectionately
Willa
Isn’t Churchill a great old boy? Isn’t England a great old land?
TO ROSCOE CATHER
May 22, 1943
My dear Roscoe:
Extract from a letter written by Mary Virginia Mellen on her return to Colorado Springs:
“I do wish that you could see Uncle Roscoe now. He looks perfectly splendid! Mother had said that he looked almost cadaverous after his severe sickness of a year ago, so I was prepared for that. What was my most happy surprise when this erect, very healthy looking man walked briskly across the lobby and kissed my hand! Truly, he seemed in much better physical health than when I saw him last, five years ago. He said he had been feeling much better for the past month or so than he had for a long time. It would have done your heart good if you could have been with us that evening, for we had the jolliest kind of dinner party.”