by Willa Cather
Mary Virginia has done many, many kind things for me in the last ten years, but she has never done a kinder thing than when she wrote me the above. You see, my dear, brother, when I knew that you were going South to go through with that tedious lawsuit, my heart sank. I suppose one judges others by oneself—especially the few “others” who are dear to one. I just can’t, as yet, stand up to a tedious business meeting, not even at the Knopf office where everyone is so friendly. (That same acute sensitiveness to personalities which got me along in my own work, now simply threatens to destroy me.) Ever since your letter came, telling me that you were going South, the dread of what it might do to you has interfered a good deal with my sleep. You see, you were a very frail man when I saw you last. Mary Virginia’s letter arrived only a few days ago, and when I read it I just broke down and cried. As soon as I was really sure of my voice, I called up little Margaret by telephone and read that portion of Virginia’s letter to her. I feel completely reassured, because Virginia has never deceived me—even when she had to tell me unpleasant truths—and there is certainly the ring of truth in the above extract. She was glad for you, and for me.
Lovingly to you and Meta,
Willie
TO WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
May 29, 1943
Dear, friendly, Mr. Phelps:
I recognized your handwriting before I opened your letter. You have so often been kind enough to send me friendly comments that I otherwise would not have seen. I am especially pleased to have this word from J. M. Barrie about “A Lost Lady”. My intercourse with Sir James was very singular, because he was so shy and indirect in personal intercourse. I first knew that he liked my books from a message he sent by a young Englishman who was travelling in this country—a message about “Death Comes for the Archbishop” which was very pleasant to hear. Then, through another friend of his, he began to use gentle pressure upon me for an autographed copy of “My Ántonia”. I did not take it seriously, for I don’t think writers often care about autographed copies. (After all, isn’t the one real and only autograph in the book itself, on every page of it?) Another friend in England wrote me that Barrie was ill, and that he really wanted an autographed copy. I, of course, sent one. I sent it through a Mrs. [Marie M.] Meloney, whom you probably know.
When young Stephen Tennant was travelling in this country about eight years ago, I saw a good deal of him, since we had intermittently corresponded for a long time. While he was here Thomas Hardy’s widow wrote him such a charming letter, asking him to tell me how much pleasure Hardy got out of “A Lost Lady”. Mrs. Hardy herself died within a year or two afterward.
I think there is nothing quite so satisfying as having given pleasure, in their old age, to some of the writers who fascinated one in one’s youth.
We have grown to be old friends by this time and I may sign myself
Faithfully yours,
Willa Cather
TO HARRISON T. BLAINE
June 9, 1943
Dear Harrison Blaine:
What a nice letter you wrote me! I am glad you did not repress your first impulse. I think you will be interested to know that there is a singular connection between “My Ántonia” and High Mowing [near Jaffrey, New Hampshire]. Before Mrs. Blaine bought that lovely place, Mrs. Robinson let it for two summers to old friends of mine. A considerable part of “My Ántonia”, from page 163 through page 263, was written in a little tent which I put up at the bottom of the hill which slopes from your mother’s house toward Stony Brook Farm. The tent was very simple—no floor—pegged down to the ground. Inside it there was nothing but a table and a camp chair. I was living at the Shattuck Inn that summer and autumn, and every morning, after a very early breakfast, I used to go up the Stony Brook Farm road and cut through the hedge into Mrs. Robinson’s property and to my tent. I carried a little portfolio with my papers and pens. I always left my ink-bottles in the tent. No one disturbed me. I had two good hours of work and then, in the heat of the day, I used to climb the stone wall and go back to the Inn through the shady wood which still lies at the foot of the hill. The wood was well kept in those days. Lady’s-slipper and Hookers’ orchid used to grow there. Once, in the late autumn, I met an agreeable fox in the wood.
Of course, some of the people at the hotel knew that I went to the tent to write, but no one knew what I was writing. After the book was published I never happened to tell anyone that part of it was written in the tent at High Mowing. It is not my habit to talk about any piece of work I have in hand—that would spoil the fun of it for me. I finished the book in New York that winter, and I think you are the only person to whom I have ever confided the fact that a portion of that particular book was written in the tent. But since you love High Mowing (as I do) and since you really care for the book that was partly written there, it seems to me you ought to know that there is a very real connection between the book and the place.
The next summer and autumn I was working in the same tent upon “One of Ours”, but I stayed too late into October and got a bad touch of influenza. It was a very rainy autumn and the tent, having no floor, used to get pretty wet. After that year the Shattucks were kind enough to let me have several rooms on the top floor of the hotel, where there was no clattering of feet over my head, and I worked very happily there on other books. Since the hurricane altogether destroyed the beautiful wood behind the hotel, I have not gone there so often. My favorite walk for the afternoon was through that wood as far as the Ark, and then back again to the Shattuck Inn. The next time I am in Jaffrey I will certainly go to see your mother at High Mowing, and I hope you will be there to have tea with us.
You say you have a personal reason for writing to me about Ántonia. But have I not an even more personal reason for replying to you? That book and that place are always associated in my mind, though the actual scene of the Western book was so far away.
Cordially yours,
And hoping that we shall meet in Jaffrey
Willa Cather
TO ALFRED A. KNOPF
July 29 [1943]
Asticou Inn, Northeast Harbor, Maine
Dear Alfred;
Two weeks ago I reached this very satisfactory refuge, after travelling up and down the Maine coast in an unsuccessful search for comfortable quarters. All the old pleasant places of five years ago are deserted. Bar Harbor is a ghost town. All the big houses of the rich are now inhabited by one caretaker. The good shops of former times are shut down—main street a row of dirty windows.
Here Miss Lewis and I have a very comfortable cottage with a lovely garden. Absolute quiet. We take our meals at the Inn which is a short block away. We walk to it over green turf and fine trees and hedges keep it out of sight. The food is not very good, certainly, but better than I have found anywhere else except in Boston.
Next week Miss Lewis goes up to Grand Manan to look after some repairs that are to be made on her cottage there, but I shall be here for the next fortnight at least. The weather is always cool here. One needs a wood fire every evening. We have a good deal of rain and heavy weather, but there is a good library, and after the horror of Portland and it’s war industries I am very willing to sit indoors by the fire and read forgotten books—or botanize a little. This place is not nearly so interesting as Grand Manan but it is much more comfortable (in the conventional way) and not so reduced in food supplies.
I hope you are out of New York and its preposterous “heat waves.”
On any day that you are not too busy I’d be glad to hear from you about anything you’re interested in. I’m delighted that Ezra Pound is a “traitor”—though I can’t believe him very genuine even in that role. It has been the Hell of a summer, hasn’t it? In every way.
Languidly but faithfully
Willa Cather
The remark about the poet Ezra Pound is a reference to his anti-semitic, fascist turn during World War II.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
August 25 [1943]
Hotel Statler, Boston
My Dear Roscoe;
Your telegram came and I wrote Crowell at once. We have been held up in this very dirty hotel for 8 days waiting for two seats in a chair car from Boston to New York,—a five hour journey! We leave tomorrow. The heat here has been terrible. After seven weeks at the Asticou Inn where no spirits are served and the food was very poor, I now dine at the good old Parker House, drink a cocktail every night and go to a movie show every afternoon!
My love to you and your two ladies.
W.
TO ZOË AKINS
December 4, 1943
My dear Zoe;
You will remember that while you were in New York last summer I telephoned you that I was going into the Presbyterian Hospital for a few weeks. In reality I was going in to have the celebrated Doctor Whipple take out my gall bladder and appendix. The operation was a brilliant success (no drainage tubes or any of those horrid things) but the recovery was very slow and pretty awful. I weighed one hundred and twenty-six pounds when I went into the hospital and I came out weighing a little under one hundred and ten. For most of the month of August and all of September, I was lying in bed, in the apartment, too ill to move, and the heat was outrageous. To make matters worse, it rained every day. I sweated pounds off, just as English jockeys do when they are in training. I kept on hating food and there was an undercurrent of nausea all the time, until about the first of December. Since then I have been pulling up rapidly. I now weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, have a good appetite and enjoy food. I rather hope I will gain a little more because I am not strong enough to go shopping and all the dresses that hang in my closets are preposterously too big for me!! Even my shoes are much too big. My hair all came out and I have frightful neuralgia in my head—unless it is tied up in woolen scarves at night.
I am relating these tiresome details because I am sure that you have known for some time that something was the matter with me. You asked me once over the telephone if you had offended me. Of course, my dear Zoe, we have always had different “ideologies” (horrid word!) and as people grow older their beliefs, like their arteries, grow harder—we are less and less able to sympathetically comprehend the other fellow’s point of view. But something more than this, something physical which I could not understand, was making me more and more short-tempered and irritable, unable to bear my own shortcomings and those of my friends. Now that I am pigeon-livered, maybe I will have more patience with the “new poetry” (manufactured by mathematicians and politicians) and with the distorting processes with which the film makers attack the old masterpieces, drag them out of their secluded niches, and use them for their horrid purposes. I [the rest of the typewritten letter cut away; then handwritten on the back:] Here let me insist that when an intelligent man makes a good film (Noel Coward, for example) I enjoy it as much as anybody. But these cheap hash-overs of really great literature (Anna Karenina, Notre Dame de Paris, Wuthering Heights etc) show the poverty of the minds behind the camera. Who would steal music if he could write music of his own? Novels of action can be dramatized. Novels of feeling, even if it is only feeling for a city or a historic period, cannot be.
Well, as Mrs. [Florence] Arliss cabled “Happy New Year anyway!”
Affectionately
Willa
TO SIGRID UNDSET
[December 25, 1943]
Dear Sigrid Undset;
This is Christmas day, and the lovely callas you sent me are standing white and tall on the table beside me. They have been good company for me ever since they came. This is such a terrible Christmas—it seems like a preparation for horrors unexampled and unguessed at. For the first time in my life I feel afraid—afraid of losing everything one cherished in the world and all the finest youth of the world. The address from the Vatican does not cheer one much. The new evils we all know, but in their nature they destroy our power to combat them. The cold pride of science is the most devilish thing that has ever come into this world. It is the absolute enemy of happiness. The human mind, not the spirit, has disinherited human nature.
This is a maudlin note to send out on Christmas day. Please forgive me. The time is very dark.
Affectionately always
Willa Cather
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ
December 31, 1943
My very dear Irene:
The pudding came so wonderfully wrapped and decorated that I hated to separate it from its beautiful box. Believe me, the friendship and kind thoughts that go into the making of a gift like this, which is done with your own hands, and brings your mother’s favourite recipe for a sauce, means more to me than you can perhaps imagine. I do thank you, dear—it warms my heart that you thought of me.
I hate to write gloomy letters, but this has been a rather stern year for me. I have lost three very dear old friends of the Pittsburgh circle within the last year; their death was most unexpected. Some of my friends seem to have lost patience with me, at last. I have had no word from Carrie this Christmas or for a long time back, and I think she might be sorry if she knew how sad it has made me. I don’t know how I can have hurt her. Perhaps I wrote her too many long letters about the revival of interest in “Antonia” and the new edition of it in England. Or perhaps she was very much disappointed that I did not go out to Red Cloud in October or November. I had planned to go, and looked forward to it so eagerly—that was while I was up in northern Maine. But when I got back to town and had to struggle with getting the apartment cleaned and the terrible problem of domestic help, my courage sank little by little. We had no maid at all until the first of November, but did our own housekeeping and went out to most of our meals. Edith had absolutely promised to go back to the office the first of November. After she went we had two unfortunate experiments with help. Of course, all phases of housekeeping have been very trying. By the time Mary Virginia wrote me that she was coming East, I felt sure that she could help me out a little, and she did. She helped me principally by living at an hotel and coming to see me very rarely. She saw at once that any kind of excitement, particularly pleasurable excitement, simply used me up. It uses me up more than the drudgery of washing dishes and cleaning house. For instance: when I had Virginia and Helen Louise (who lives away off in Jersey) lunch with me at Sherry’s and then took them up to the Frick Art Gallery, we had an awfully jolly time and I was very proud of both my nieces. They pleased me very much. But I had a bad night after the party, and had to stay in bed and be very quiet all the next day. Virginia caught on to all those things at once, and never came to see me without a special message from me, and never stayed long when she came. I was so afraid she would not understand this queer state of bad nerves, but she did. We didn’t go to a single play or movie together while she was here—not even to a concert.
You know, I think, how hard things always hit me (you are very much like that yourself, my dear!) Well, they hit me just as hard as ever, but I can’t stand up under them. That confounded operation did something to my nerves.
Now, you can see how difficult it would be for me to go back to Red Cloud, where there are so many pleasant and painful associations. I think I could stand the scorn of the scorners (such as Helen Mac [McNeny]), but seeing the people whom I really care for in the old surroundings, would be pretty difficult. Why, I am afraid I would go around weeping, as dear Mollie used to!
Then Elsie, you know, has made things pretty difficult. However, we will not go into that. But, you see, all things put together when one is very weak and wobbly, make one timid. I wish I had asked Mary Virginia to talk to you about this phase of her visit here. She caught on to the state of things at once, and saw that she had to touch on things very lightly. Didn’t you think, Irene, that she looked awfully well and seemed very tactful and “experienced”? I mean in the right way.
Mary Creighton wrote me an awfully nice letter acknowledging a little check I sent the Guild. As Mary wrote me once, “there are always two sides to every story.” She tries to give both sides consideration. Carrie is more violent,—just as
I am, or used to be. I am much milder now—and more cowardly. I am afraid she has given me up for a quitter. It makes me very sad. I am not whining, I am simply quietly telling you the truth. Please don’t cut me off, my dear! Just now I am wearing my right hand in a brace again—result of having to answer too many letters from splendid soldier boys. But this letter I shall sign myself.
Have a happy Winter in Mexico, and when you come back in the Spring you must come on to New York, and you will see the situation and understand.
My love to you and Mr. Weisz. It is snowing here today, and I love to think of you going toward that sunny land.
Lovingly and Faithfully
Willie
(Excuse hand in brace!)
PART TWELVE
The Final Years
1944–1947
Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love. Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world’s work would ever get done.
—WILLA CATHER TO IRENE MINER WEISZ, October 25, 1945
Cather and S. S. McClure in New York, May 19, 1944 (photo credit 12.1)
CATHER’S LAST YEARS WERE PAINFUL as she battled the physical strain of illness and the emotional strain of loss, as well as the daily news of the war, which saddened her profoundly. But there were bright spots, too: she took great pleasure in her nieces and nephews, she wrote a few stories, and she began work on another novel. Set in the fourteenth century around the Papal Palace in Avignon, France, this final novel, never finished, was to be called Hard Punishments. The story concerned the friendship of two young men who suffered medieval kinds of punishments—one had his tongue torn out, the other his thumbs stretched. Only fragments of the manuscript remain.