by Willa Cather
By the way, I respect the family prejudices and never order cocktails when Charles is dining with me. I never drink them myself—don’t like them—but I order them for my men friends. I think you can trust me to be a discreet hostess. I have become very fond of the lad. I surely think you and Ethel have been lucky in your children!
Affectionately to you both
Willie
[Felix “Doc”] Blanchard, the Army’s white hope, is Charles’ room mate I understand!
Army was the national champion in college football in 1944 and ’45, and “Doc” Blanchard won the Heisman Trophy in 1945.
The following letter was first published in Talking Book Topics in June 1948 as part of their announcement that a recording of Death Comes for the Archbishop was now available. The editors thought Cather’s letter “an excellent statement by a first-rate artist of the essence of Talking Book reading” but four years later printed an apology in the magazine for unintentionally violating the prohibition on the publication of her letters.
TO ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
December 11, 1944
Dear Mr. MacLeish:
You have already heard from Alfred Knopf that I am quite willing that you should put three of my books into records for the blind.
I would never have been unwilling to have such records made had I been sure that the recording was done by people who read simply, as our mothers and grandmothers did when they read aloud to us in our childhood. My refusal was largely the result of a singular coincidence. Some months or weeks before I received your original request, I was dining with an old friend in a little Italian restaurant where the radio was turned on for the evening. Over this radio I heard several chapters from My Antonia read by a young woman who had all the airs and graces of a small town elocutionist. They were quiet chapters from a very quiet book—a mute on the strings. This reader certainly removed the mute, and with all her physical powers she put into the text what was not there.
When a book is read for recording, the reader is not only a collaborator but an interpreter of the writer. It is the reader who decides the tempi and the stresses. He is even able to attempt a personification of the characters, and to make them declamatory where the writer has kept the dialogue casual and low in tone. I am afraid that people who have worked for the radio find it hard to refrain from virtuosity, and I really do not think all books should be read in an elocutionary way.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO FRED OTTE
December 12, 1944
My dear Fred Otte:
How nice it is to hear from you again! I think the steel industry and oil country must be grand for keeping up one’s enthusiasms. Oh, dogs are nothing new to me. I have several friends who have gone to the dogs. In social relations (relations with humans), dogs of different breeds seem to have very special and individual effects. I never knew a fancier of Collie dogs who was not very companionable and sympathetic. Perhaps that is because they are all Scotchmen. (I think most Scotchmen are sentimental underneath their grouch.) But, Oh, beware the Norwegian Elkhounds! Social relations with them will contaminate almost any man. One friend of mine who began raising Elkhounds, and taking prizes for them, has become as savage as they are—a biter and snapper of the first order! Beware the Elkhound! And write to me on my next birthday.
Very cordially yours,
Willa Cather
TO ROSCOE CATHER
[December 1944]
POETRY!!
There was an old writer who lived in a stew,
’Cause she had so many nieces she didn’t know what to do!
And they lived so many places she just lost her wits,
So she siezed her address book and tore it to bits!!
P.S. Please send me present addresses of Elizabeth and Margaret. Have something for them and can’t send even a card.
My right hand has gone back on me and is very lame.
Merry Christmas and love
Willie
The postscript of the following letter suggests that Cather may have had a different publishing arrangement in mind for the novel Hard Punishments, though the details of these plans—and of Knopf’s role in them—are unknown.
TO ROSCOE CATHER
December 29 [1944]
Dear Brother;
If I had the wellest hand in the world instead of a very sick hand I could never tell you the pleasure these beautiful violets have given me. They came on the morning of Christmas Eve, among the first to come, so I had long joy of them before I got tired. They were more gorgeous this year than ever before and filled my room and my sitting room with that moist spring-like fragrance which is like nothing else on earth. They were the Parma Violets this year (they are not always to be had in winter) and they are much the sweetest of all.
On the same evening, from the same florist, came a box of yellow jonquils from Charles Edwin. He has been sending them to me at Christmas time since he first came East, two years before he ever met me. Where did he ever learn nice ways and gentle manners? I often wonder.
Lovingly,
Willie
My wretched hand went back on me because I had been working hard on a story for my London publisher, Cassell, to be printed for next Christmas with illustrations—my legendary kind of theme—Time about 1340 A.D. Interests me very much. I hope my hand will get better and let me go on with it. My hand (not the story!) is more painful than it has been before.
Lovingly, and so gratefully, dear.
Willie
So glad that Virginia will have her husband for awhile.
TO ZOË AKINS
January 5, 1945
My dear Zoe:
Never worry about the turkey. Don’t think I could have managed him if he had arrived. We have only a part time cook—not very expert.
But the plant from Thorley’s was, and is, a great success: a cyclamen, deep rose color, with the beautiful leaves all fresh and strong. I enjoy beautiful plants just as much as I detest ratty ones. This one has given me great pleasure. I would love to write you by hand, but just in the middle of a piece of work which I was enjoying very much, my right hand went back on me complete and is tied up in a brace again. It cannot even get out to wish you a Happy New Year with a pen.
Thinking about years, Old and New, (in a period of enforced inactivity, one does think, you know) it has occurred to me that you have had the things you most wanted out of the years, and that I have got a good deal of what I wanted. Above all, I have pretty well escaped the things I violently did not want, some of which were: too much money, noisy publicity, the bother of meeting lots of people. While I was editor of McClure’s I had to meet a great many people, both here and in England. I enjoyed it, but after I had enough of it, I wanted to be absolutely free—and I have enjoyed that much more.
Affectionately and with a thousand good wishes,
Willa Cather
It is unclear who Cather is referencing when she refers to the “Hicks brothers” in the letter below; certainly critic Granville Hicks wrote critical reviews of her works, but he had no brother who also wrote criticism.
TO IRENE MINER WEISZ
January 6, 1945
Darling Irene:
I have hoped my hand might get better so that I could write you with my pen. But when I had been working very happily on a story that interests me very much, my right hand suddenly collapsed (about the 16th of December) and has been tied up in its metal brace ever since—a terrible disappointment. I am afraid I will lose all of the joy of the story in the long wait which will now come.
Irene, I have read your dear letter over many times, and each time I read it I cry. It is because I have put my real feelings and real heart into my books that they speak to you. You may remember that I had to make my own living and help those at home until I was twenty-five years old: teaching, (I was a good teacher—took it seriously) newspaper work, writing for small magazines. I often wonder why I went on writing, for I wasn’t very am
bitious. I think I can honestly say that I wrote for pleasure, and not from vanity. When I wrote about the people I loved and the places I loved, they came back to me so vividly, that it was like having them all over again. They warmed me and excited me, as their actual presence would have done—perhaps more so. So, no matter how hard I worked at my job all through the week, I always wrote for my own pleasure on Saturday and Sunday.
I have managed to recapture a good many of the pleasures of the past, in one book or another, but I have had to pay for my pleasures as I went along. The writers whom I most admire have been very kind to me. You remember President Masaryk, former President of Czechoslovakia. I have a bundle of his letters to me, running over a period of eight years—the last one written shortly before his death. He was a great linguist and a fine critic. Some day I would like to tell you about him.
Yes, the world has been kind. But certainly my home town has not been very kind, nor some of the people who go out from there. Helen Mac, when she was in New York, espoused the cause of the Hicks brothers—two not-very-successful reviewers, who have made almost a career explaining to people what a second-rate scribbler I am, after all. I was amused when I noticed in the Red Cloud paper that on two occasions Helen McNeny had reviewed and lectured on a book by Granville Hicks, in the Auld Library [in Red Cloud]!! These books would not necessarily attack me personally, but would ridicule everything I believe in. Of course, all this is gratifying to the little group at home who sit around and do fine detective work on “where she got this, and where she got that”. I could tell you in confidence, Irene, that so often I do not remember at all where I “got” them. After Ántonia was published, Father pointed out to me half a dozen incidents—things I had done or seen with him (the two crazy Russians, etc.), and I honestly believed that I had invented them. They simply came into my mind, the way things do come when one is interested. When one is writing hard, one drives toward the main episodes and the detail takes care of itself. Unless the detail is spontaneous, unsought for by the writer, he isn’t much of a writer—has mistaken his job.
Let me break this serious discussion by a little fun. Mrs. Fred Garber, out in California, was very indignant about A Lost Lady, because, when the early chapters of the story came out in the Century Magazine, she went around boasting that Mrs. Forrester was her daughters’ grandmother. Then when the plot thickened up and Frank Ellinger appeared, she was very angry. She once told Douglass, much later, that she should have tried to stop that book in some way. Douglass was too polite to tell her that the book has already been translated into French, Dutch, German and Norwegian, and that she would have had a hard time stopping it. Mrs. Charley Platt would certainly have liked to stop it. I was perfectly square about that book. I was staying with Isabelle in Toronto when the Red Cloud paper came, announcing Mrs. Garber’s death in Oregon. It shook me up more than I would have thought. The day was very hot. I went to my room and laid down to rest. I had never once thought of writing about Mrs. Garber, but within an hour the story was all made in my mind, as if I had read it somewhere. Mrs. Platt didn’t agree with my portrait, but that was what Mrs. Garber seemed to me, and what she meant to me. If a story has any real vitality, if it goes on being printed and sold in half a dozen languages, the root of it must be a real feeling—a strong personal feeling. It takes skill, of course, to get that feeling across to many people in many languages, but the strong feeling that comes out of the living heart is the thing most necessary—and most rarely found.
I beg you, dear Irene, never to show this letter to anyone, unless it might be Carrie or Mary. What a scream Helen Mac and the Hickses (and probably Mr. Leighton) would get out of it!
I am grateful for your understanding that I am not a smart trick writer. I have always felt that you felt something human and affectionate in my books.
Lovingly
Willie
Hand very bad today.
As Cather indicates in the following, it was her third and final letter to Carl Weber about the Housman visit. She did not in fact have any plans to go to Mexico in 1945.
TO CARL J. WEBER
January 31, 1945
New York City
Dear Mr. Weber:
Please disregard any suggestion I may have made that you trace some of the erroneous statements about my visit to Housman. The world is full of erroneous statements, and I notice that they seldom do any one serious harm.
“By misdirections find directions out”? That is a successful method, until it is carried too far. In your first letter you stated that you had heard that I called upon Housman, and that “probably he was rude, as always.” I replied to your letter only because I thought silence might mean acquiescence to your supposition that the man was rude. He wasn’t rude at all, but very courteous. I felt that I should say so.
In answer to your second letter I went a good deal farther than I should have gone, and told you exactly where I met Housman and how I obtained his address.
Now comes your third letter, which is practically a questionnaire. To these questions I do not feel that it is incumbent upon me to reply. You even ask me to expose a second person to cross-examination. After all, this is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One can dilate upon one’s personal experiences, or one can be reserved about them.
I am leaving for Mexico City within a few days, and this is an opportune time to bring our correspondence to a close.
Very sincerely yours,
Willa Cather
TO ROSCOE CATHER
February 8, 1945
My dear Brother:
I have wanted to write this letter to you for five years, and I have simply never had the time to write or dictate anything that seemed so little important. I am always away behind in answering my mail. The subject matter of this letter really isn’t important in itself, but it is important to me that you should know these facts which have pleased me very much.
If you are ever near a library where they have the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, please spend a little time looking up these things. I bought the fourteenth edition five years ago, because my old eleventh edition was bound in soft suede and the limp backs were difficult for my lame hand.
When I bought the fourteenth edition my bookseller sent me Volume I for inspection, and in it he put a little mark. I opened it at the mark, naturally, and found an article on American Literature with a full page illustration made up of small photographs of American authors: all the old boys we used to study in school, and a few of the newer boys. But there were only three women—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and myself. I was pleased, of course, but did not think much about it. The five years went by and a few days ago I happened to be looking up the animal caribou; his habitat. In turning over the pages I saw something that looked familiar on the left-hand page. It really was my name—rather startled me. I read the article—short but extremely well written. I would have been well pleased with even a less pleasing article in that encyclopedia.
Press agent stuff is pretty well guarded against in the Britannica. A committee of experts, on all subjects covered, is appointed by the British Museum, to read the copy and pass upon it. The literary and historical material has been very much condensed for the fourteenth edition (a new edition is made every twenty-five years) because of the enormous development in mechanics and scientific studies. This little article, however, pleases me very much, and I think it will please you.
Lovingly always
Willie
TO YALTAH MENUHIN
April 20 [1945?]
My Dear Yaltah;
I was so pleased to have a word from you at Easter time, and to know that the Good Friday music recalled to you with pleasure the afternoon when you and Hephzibah and I heard Parsifal together. I still love the opera and the legend—though so much of Wagner has been rather spoiled for us by being boisterously played for very un-musical purposes.
Miss Lewis and I had a wonderful evening with your mother a
nd father when they were here this winter. It really seemed as if you three, as you were ten years ago, might come bursting in at any moment. We all heard Yehudi’s Bach concert with [Wanda] Landowska. I think that was the most beautiful and lofty music I have ever listened to.
With love and happy memories
Your “Aunt Willa”
TO CARRIE MINER SHERWOOD
April 29 [1945]
My Dear Carrie;
The Easter storm that was a break for you was a break for me also. I haven’t had such a letter from you for years—a letter which sounded as if you were talking to me and sitting close beside me. So I want to begin this letter in my own hand, though I can’t carry on very far. The tendon in my right thumb has never properly healed; bad weather, too much exercise–––and it has to go back in its metal brace again. Last fall, when we first got home from Maine (where I had been writing steadily and very happily with no bad results) I started in with enthusiasm to help with the house-cleaning. No bad results at first–––then, smash! I had to put on the brace again and wear it for four months straight. Only took it off to write a few Christmas cards and the Christmas checks I always send. You, too, seem to have a hand which gets sick. Don’t drive it! Be careful. Dictate, you would soon get used to giving dictation. Of course I can’t dictate in my own work—I have to see the picture shape itself on the page before me—the sound of my own voice would make me self-conscious. But I dictate all my letters, even those to old and dear friends.
Everything you tell me about your grandchildren interests me very much. I have often wondered where they all were, and what they were doing. Of course, the younger ones I do not remember very much, but I remember John Sherwood and Betty very well, indeed. Malvina Hoffman is generally said to be more interesting as an ethnologist than as an artist, but I have not seen any of her work and cannot have an opinion. Mabel Dodge’s Indian husband simply took the name of Luhan because his Indian name would not be understandable among white people. A good many of the more sophisticated Indians do that. The name used for the owner of the white mules is Lujon [in Death Comes for the Archbishop]. I varied the spelling purposely, so that it would not look like Tony’s name. Both, the name Lujon and Luhan, are very common Mexicans names—about as common as Smith is in this country. The white mules were named Contento and Angelica. Mabel Dodge’s husband, of course, had no such mules. The ones I know were owned by Mexicans.