The Selected Letters of Willa Cather Read online

  TO WILL OWEN JONES

  January 2 [1903]

  Pittsburgh

  My Dear Mr. Jones;

  Did you ever get my letter telling you the papers I wanted, the ones containing the letters from Avignon, Hyeres, and Lavandou? Can you find them for me.

  I am to have a volume of verse published this spring—March or April. Badger, of Boston is the publisher. He is putting out a lot of new verse by Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Harriet Prescott Spofford etc. He has made me most liberal terms and if the book sells well I shall make a neat little sum from it. He wants to send circulars to a number of people who know me, and I want to ask you if you can lend me a Lincoln directory for a few days? I shall need it next week, and will express it back to you shortly. If you cant send a directory a telephone book would help me out. I shall have a review copy of the book sent you as early as possible.

  Best wishes for the new year to you all.

  Faithfully

  Willa S. Cather

  In the spring of 1903 Cather was also working toward publication of her first book of fiction: a collection of short stories called The Troll Garden. Though this and April Twilights were her first books, she was by then an experienced and well-published author. Since her college days, she had published several hundred newspaper columns and reviews, many poems, and more than thirty pieces of fiction. Nevertheless, she felt that this first book of fiction, filled mostly with stories that had not yet appeared in magazines, was crucial to her development as a writer. She would soon travel to New York, to the offices of S. S. McClure, to see if the publisher might be interested in her manuscript.

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  Saturday [March 28, 1903]

  My Dearest Dorothy;

  I dont know when I have been so beaten out with mental effort and so sick with disappointment. I ought to have been more considerate of you and faced the facts and let you know yesterday, but it just seemed as though I couldn’t give it up. I’m almost in despair for fear I cant explain clearly enough for you to really understand. You see, Dorothy, those wretched tales went back on me. When I got my Chicago mag. work off my hands and came to the pruning and fixing of that set of short stories I just fainted by the wayside. There is weeks of work to be done on them. Then I decided to throw them aside and go without them, but [Francis] Hill and several other people of some experience told me it was a great advantage to take things to the publisher ones self. I will have them ready later in the spring and will have to go on with them then, and as I have to go to Red Cloud this summer I cant afford two trips to New York. I hate to let such a consideration stand between me and what I want to do, and much worse do I hate that it should cause you disappointment. Really, Dorothy, you’ll never know how cut up I am, how much I want to go and to go now. It’s been a long time since I have wanted anything so desperately hard, I’m almost glad to find that I haven’t lost the capacity. I was so sure about those tales, that itself is a blow under the belt, but its quite faded into nothingness at my keener chagrin at disappointing you and not seeing you. After my wretched misunderstanding of things last fall, it seemed necessary to see you before the spring days set life fairly in motion again. I can only beg you to help me bear my own disappointment and say with me “another night, another day”. It really wont be long, Dear, and you will have more respect for me if I come with the work done at last. It’s bitter hard to grind and grind, when I have so little time to live at all, but if I once get this volume done and done well, I’ll be a more agreeable person to know. Some of it is mighty good, and in the next few weeks I’ll bring the rest up or just break down trying. Do you want to know the discouraging details I wonder? Well, the last story, “Paul’s Case” is just undigested, shows the haste in which I put it through, and Pilgrim Joy has fallen down completely, will have to be thrown out and another done in its place. Then I’ll have my cycle, 2 painter stories, 1 actor, 1 sculptor, 1 musician, 1 musical study, 1 literary man, and one case of an artistic constitution without talent, and Fulvia. The title is to be “The Troll Garden” ([printed out:] The Troll Garden) with a sentence from Chas. Kingsley to explain its fitness. Bear with me yet a little longer, Dorothy, and then in the day of ripe fruit we’ll rejoice together.

  Oh if only I felt that I could make the two trips, how much we could put into the yarns together! I am so tired of things and people here that it seems as if I could not stay and grind the weeks away when you are waiting for me under brighter skies. I want to go so much more than ever I wanted to go abroad last summer. I some how need your counsel and encouragement more than ever I needed it before. But since I must fight it out alone a few weeks longer, dont please think unkindly of me. You know how hard it is for me to give things up. I never knew half how much I wanted to go to you until it was born in upon me that I must not. For just once I’m going to do the hard and irksome duty and hammer away with dull eyes and a heavy heart. Pray for me that it be not in vain. I am going to send Phaedra [“The Marriage of Phaedra”] on to you and I want you to ask your mother to read it for me too. Heavens! those tales ought to go after this, I feel as though I’m giving up enough for them. Please dont think I’m selfish about them if you can help it, dear,—I’m harder on myself than on you.

  Will you please apologize to your mother and father for my bad manners? I shant blame them if they just quietly refuse to see me when I do come, nor you if you lose all patience with me. I remember well enough how badly I behaved when you once disappointed me about coming. My dear girl I am just all beaten out with battling with myself, and I’ll not write you more now. You’ll never know how hard it was to send that second telegram. I feel as though it would be many days before I will really want my dinner. Please let me hear from you that you do understand and have not left me to fight with my failures alone. If I can only get the rest of these things worked up to the proper key, I believe it will make you as happy as it does me. If you could see what I have done with Fulvia [eventually titled “Flavia and Her Artists”] you would see why I am hopeful. It seems as though I really cant say goodbye for five or six weeks longer, but if I can just go to you bringing my sheaves with me—Dear Dorothy burn a candle at some little Latin church for me.

  All my love goes to you

  Willie

  I feel that I ought to tell you why I put off reading those things and finding out as to where I stood for so long. We have had no servants for three weeks, Mrs. McClung has been sick in bed ever since the cook left, and to cap it all one of Isabelle’s cousins died last week. I cant do much to help in the house with all my school work, but I have not had an evening to myself until Thursday and Friday for about three weeks. I just could not get at my own work before, and when I finally did the blow fell. Isabelle feels dreadfully about it, both on my account and yours.

  TO GEORGE SEIBEL

  April 28 [1903]

  My Dear Mr. Seible;

  Certainly you are better at not forgetting old acquaintance than anyone I know. I could not at all tell you over the telephone how much I feel your good will in going into that review [of April Twilights] so heartily. Of course the appreciative tone of the notice will help the book, but it was not that which especially pleased me. There was a frank and friendly ring about it that put courage into me and made me feel equal to trying almost anything. Of course I am mighty glad that you like the verses, but I am much more pleased that you seem glad to like them, and that you blow upon me with such a friendly wind. Surely we can disprove Hesiod’s epigram that,

  “Potter hates Potter,

  and poet hates poet.”

  To tell you the truth, you have so often handled me severely in private apropos of some of those same verses that I rather expected chastisement and sunny clemency has quite taken my breath away.

  We shall expect you on Thursday night, and please come early, as soon after seven oclock as possible.

  Faithfully always

  Willa S. Cather

  In early May Cather met S. S. McClure, the o
wner and publisher of the very successful magazine McClure’s, at his offices in New York. The meeting was the beginning of a great change in Cather’s life.

  TO WILL OWEN JONES

  May 7, 1903

  Pittsburgh

  My Dear Mr. Jones;

  I do believe you’ve got me fairly launched at last, at least it looks so. About a week after I sent my stories to S. S. McClure, he telegraphed me to go to New York at once. I went and our first business talk took up two hours of a fine spring morning. Life has simply been another proposition to me ever since. I go about with care because I have become so much more valuable to myself. At ten oclock last Friday I was not much afraid of street car accidents and things, but when I left the office at one I had become worth saving. He will publish the collection in book form, but will first run them in the magazine to give me the benefit of the extra revenue. [William Dean] Howells, he thinks, will use some of them in Harpers [Harper’s Monthly Magazine]. The book will be out next winter. But the important result of our several interviews is that he has agreed to take everything I do and place it for me if he cannot use it himself; and that he has so encouraged and strengthened me that I feel as though I want to do well almost as much for him as for myself. What a genius he has for proselyting! He takes hold of you in such a personal way that business ceases to be a feature of your relations with him. He has the enthusiasm of a boy. He took me right out to his house and wanted me to stop with him, but I only stayed there one day as I had promised to go to the Canfields. Then Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson [Frances (Fanny) Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson] was at the house and she had read the yarns and talked very helpfully. In the end Mr. McClure took them without any changes at all. I don’t think there was a circumstance of my personal life the man did’nt go into and discuss and plan for. If he were a religious propagandist he would have people going to the stake for him through sheer personal devotion.

  Surely you never did such a good turn to anyone as when you gave H. H. [McClure, S. S. McClure’s cousin and colleague] a strong talk about me. Several of these same stories had been sent back to me by Mr. McClure’s readers without having ever reached him at all. During my first interview with him he rang for the boy and had the two readers sent in and asked them to give an account of their stewardship. Surely I sat and held me chin high and thought my hour had struck. A moment of that sort turns back the clock of time for one and makes one feel almost as important as when one was editor of the Hesperian.

  There are other plans in the wind, but if I wrote them all I should write until midnight. In the meantime, here’s to you here’s thanks to you, for this and for Auld lang Syne, and its with a light heart I write you.

  Faithfully always

  Willa S. Cather

  Where is Sarah Harris? I’ve written her three times and elicited no reply.

  The following letter is available to us through a transcription apparently made by Witter Bynner.

  TO VIOLA ROSEBORO’

  Sunday, June 14 [1903]

  My dear Miss Roseboro:—

  Do I know a Shropshire Lad? Do I? Isn’t the internal evidence of my own verses all against me? Why I’ve been Housman’s bond slave, mentally, since his volume first appeared some six years ago. As soon as I got to England I went straight to Shropshire, to all the places—Shrewesbury, Ludlow, Kneighton, and the rivers “Ouy and Teme and Clun”. I even went to Shrewesbury jail—it stands just above the railway switch yards and that is why “Trains all night groan on the rail to men that die at morn”. I saw the “Vanes of Shrewesbury gleam islanded in Severn stream” and “football playing along the river shore, and heard the Ludlow bells play “The Conquering Hero Comes” of a Monday. In short I found everything there except Housman. Of him not a legend, not a button or feather or mark. Nobody had ever heard of him or seen his book. There was a copy in the Shrewesbury public library, but the leaves were uncut. In London I battered upon the doors of his publishers until they gave me his address. He lives in an awful suburb in quite the most horrible boarding-house I ever explored. He is the most gaunt and grey and embittered individual I know. He is an instructor in Latin inscriptions in the University of London, but I believe the position pays next to nothing. The poor man’s shoes and cuffs and the state of the carpet in his little hole of a study gave me a fit of dark depression. I would like to tell you all about it sometime: I think he is making about the only English verse that will last, the only verse of this decade I mean. It is as remarkable technically as it is unique in the truth of its sentiment. That sounds rather flat, but you will know what I mean. And how intensely it does appeal, where it appeals at all. It’s not every one who can care for it. I only know a dozen or so who see anything extraordinary in it.

  He does it all so beautifully from the country boy’s standpoint that the castle is just “Ludlow Tower” to him, as it is to the lads who walk there with their girls on Sunday afternoons. The way that man has kept all his Classical philology out of his verse, the way he has kept the meadow-level! I was there in haying season and I used to look for poor Maurice behind the hay-cocks. By the way did you know that the poor man’s name is Albert Edward, after H. R. H? I’ve gone on at great length about him, but I’ve tracked the man the length and breadth of England and done much shameless detective work on him, that I’m glad to be able to tell a few of my discoveries to some one who agrees with me about his verse. If you ever want more information just give me an opportunity and I will play on and on like a music box.

  Faithfully yours,

  Willa S. Cather

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  July 13, 1903

  Cheyenne, Wyoming

  My Dearest Dorothy;

  I got just a line from you forwarded here from Pittsburgh and hope to find a letter from you awaiting me at Red Cloud, where I will be in a few days. It is fine and cool here and Douglass and I have been enjoying our stay together mightily, though I think we both feel [the] curse of growing older more than ever before, and it is a little harder for us to get together than it has ever been. But in some ways these things make it only the more necessary and blessed to be for awhile side by side.

  The night I left Pittsburgh I was elected to the head of the English department of the Allegheny High School at a salary of $1400. There were fifteen applicants for the position so the committee declared competitive examinations on July second, and that is what kept me in Pittsburgh over time. Isabelle’s father and uncle did all the going about and seeing people for me. They were just fine, I never saw the Judge so bestir himself. I wanted it chiefly because of the desirable hours—from 8:30 to one oclock only.

  I did not get to stop in Lincoln at all, but will do so on my way back. It seemed awfully funny to come straight through. I’m not very well and the sudden jump into a very high altitude rather exhausts me. I am all unreconciled to losing all hope of seeing Vermont this year, but I do believe that its my duty to be here and in Red Cloud. I cant endure the thought of going clear out of Roscoe and Douglass’ life, and I want to keep alive all my feeling for them, whatever else I loose.

  What are you doing or studying this summer, and is your mother painting anything? My best love to you all—not forgetting your cousin Hermie

  Faithfully always

  Willie

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  Friday [probably November 27, 1903]

  My Dearest Dorothy:

  Now by Saint Peter’s Church and Peter, too, I dont know who your Childs people are, nor does Isabelle. Of course I understand how hurried your father was and it’s all right, but I should have liked to see him. He will be in Lincoln about Christmas time, you say? He’ll meet with a warm welcome there surely. Of course you are all anxious to see the new boy in Columbus. I’m glad he’s a Canfield.

  Isabelle and I have been to the theatre just once this winter—Mrs. [Minnie Maddern] Fiske in Hedda Gabler. She doesn’t do it half so well as Blanche Bates did. We do go to all the Symphony concerts however, and to a g
ood many musical things of one kind and another. I have to go to bed at ten oclock or I’m no good for teaching the next day. Edith [McClung] had her coming out party two weeks ago, and we did the heavy social for awhile, but have pretty much settled down to our monastic routine again—except Edith and her mother. We read a good deal and see a good deal of Francis Hill,—and Miss May occasionally, as often, that is, as she’ll let us. I have’nt told you what I’m writing because I dont know where I’m coming out on it—looks rather discouraging lately. It’s a rather long thing which I never intended to write but fell into by chance. I have no name for it yet and am not saying much about it because I dont intend to use it unless it pleases me at least moderately well. There are about 40,000 words of the first draft done. It’s good practice, if nothing else.

  We had a hilarious Thanksgiving dinner last night, as the Judge was away, and I feel rather knocked out this morning as a consequence. Do you remember that first Thanksgiving dinner I ate at your house in Lincoln, when Arthur Canfield was there and you were sick? Poor Marian Smith was there, too. But I wont go into reminiscences or I shall get dismal,—in consequence of too much turkey last night. I’ll hie me out and take a walk in the snow and be a little more alive next time I write. I dont mean to let letters go unanswered; I just somehow do. It’s poor management.

  A happy vacation to you

  Willie

  Cather had seen Blanche Bates star as Hedda Gabler while in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1900. It is unclear whether the forty-thousand-word manuscript refers to any work Cather eventually published.

  In January 1904, Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield complaining that Canfield had not written for six weeks. Cather suspected something was wrong, and sometime in the early months of 1904, Canfield responded.