The Selected Letters of Willa Cather Read online

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  [Early March 1904]

  My Dearest Dorothy;

  This will be a hard letter to write, as yours to me must have been. We have surely got into a snarl somehow, and I think you are right that its best to admit it. The worst of it is that its nothing that one can really put ones finger on. Of course I’ve always been conscious that I was ill tempered and ungrateful and that I behaved very childishly abroad two years ago, and frankly, I dont see how you could over look it. There is just a terribly low streak of something both ill tempered and ill bred that comes out in me only too often. It was surely not your fault that I didn’t understand French and that I felt very provincial and helpless and ignorant, and its incredible that any grown person should have behaved as I did. It makes me ill to think of it, it surely does. Ive realized what a disappointment it must have been to you, too, after you had made such an effort to be with me. Oh, the whole thing was simply beastly!—and I’ve no one but myself to blame. I suppose I am one of those perverse beings who get stiff and haughty when they know they are in the wrong, for I’ve felt a little constrained ever since, knowing all the while that the unpleasantness was all of my manufacture. That’s an ugly thing to admit, but its only fair to own up to one’s pettiness. It is just a grudge against myself that in some way gives me a sense of aloofness. That’s one thing.

  Then we have both changed. Teaching school is a quieting, settling, ageing occupation, that makes one reliable and thoughtful and consciencious, but it is not good for ones disposition. I think I must take it too seriously, for it seems to take out of me most of the elements that used to be most active between you and me. You ask about what verse I’m doing,—my dear girl, I have not done a line, literally not one line since I did the Provencal Legend [the name of a poem published in April Twilights] last December. It’s simply a case of no tunes ever flitting across my tired and torpid brain. I’m really alarmed, Dorothy, at the rate at which I seem to be losing the capacity for emotion. I often wonder whether that is like other things, that one can simply spend it all and then have to go without for the rest of ones days. The Francis Hill you’ve heard me speak of so often, the fine lad whose companionship has meant so much to both Isabelle and me, told me only last week with a tremor in his voice, that he was not going to see me any more for a while. He said I had grown formal and cold and absent minded to the degree that he simply couldnt stand it, that he wanted at least to keep the memory of our old jovial comradeship unspoiled. I have not seen him since and dont know when I shall—he comes to see Isabelle in the morning while I am at school. He says when he sees me, the person he addresses by my name is simply not I at all. As for Isabelle, she is growing old and sad under this prolonged winter of discontent. I dont know myself, I have’nt encountered the person who used to go down to the Nevins for many months. I sometimes wonder whether there is not some physical cause for it. I went to the doctor to ask whether it might not be a case of pre-mature arrival at old age, physically. He laughed at me and gave me a tonic, but Hoffs malt [Johann Hoff’s Malt Extract, a digestive aid] does not reach the spot.

  Just as I cant find myself, so I cant find you. I insist that you, too, have greatly changed. I cant define it, but I feel it maddeningly. You used to complain of losing yourself, but in those good days I never really lost you. Yes, in a certain way I feel that you are always there. If I were in trouble or ill I should know where to turn. The physical person of you, the almost family tie between us, the old wish for well being, hold perfectly staunch. But the spirit of you eludes me. Perhaps it is because our lives are so different. I hesitate to speak of it, partially because you asked me not to, partially because it may be largely due to my own torpid and unnatural state. When Francis and Isabelle have lost me, seeing me every day, how can I expect to project myself to one at a distance, how can I believe that my own feelings and impressions concerning you are trustworthy or at all reliable. Yet I am as sure of the change in you as I can well be of anything. Now what all these psychic mysteries do not effect is my feeling for you, that is the same because the roots of it go back prior to all change, back to a time when I was prodigally rich in the one thing which makes life worth the living, and was fabulously happy, even if I didn’t know it at the time. But what it does painfully effect is our intercourse. That we both feel. How is one going to shake hands, for example, i[f] ones hand has been cut off? Now I am patiently expecting that mine will grow out again, like a lobster’s claw, but it seems to take a long time for it to come. If I had left Pittsburgh when my judgement told me to, four years ago, while you were in Paris, I might not be so far afield now. I believe the truth is that one simply has to pay, hour by hour, for every whit they have taken of happiness, of excitement, exaltation—call it whatever you will—that they had no right to take. I did not know it then. I flattered myself that one could do as one pleased if one respected all the written laws. But I find there are unwritten ones which, if one disregards them, one must pay for just as dearly. Even the consolation that I hurt no one but myself has failed me, for in this aftermath of apathy and dullness you and Isabelle and Francis are called upon to pay into the bank. Hard work seems to be the only escape for me. I am dull, and poor company for myself or anyone else. I suspect in years agone I overdid the romantic aspect of things generally, and my sack cloth and ashes is to be bound in chains of apathy in a Hades of dullness for a thousand days. It may be that the life I live is too monotonous for me, that I’m reflecting the greyness around me. I fell into it all when I was tired and sore and in real grief, but the real grief, oh, that was an easy thing compared to living with myself now. I lost something, or I contracted some disease of the will, or I played to myself and posed to myself until my poor spirit will never again hold up its head.—But that’s all talk, it will. I’ll come out of this if only you can wait for me, and elope with a tenor when I am forty. Could ye not watch with me one hour? You’ve already done more than that, but if you can hold out a little longer I feel sure that this period of hibernating will pass. I will cast my dead skin and emerge—and oh if it were but to find you again as you used to be! That would be another spring indeed! I hope for it, far away as it seems. I wrote you once desperately how changed you seemed to me,—I know I must seem so to you, since I am to myself. But surely, if we tell the truth to each other—we have’nt always done that lately—the fog between us will grow thin at last.

  Thank you, Dorothy, for what you say of the Wagner matinee [“A Wagner Matinée”]. When you wrote me about your boy story the Outlook was not to be had here. I went twice to the Library, but their copy was in use. I’ve ordered one from the publisher and shall write you of it later.

  I’ve looked over this letter and am in despair at not having put anything intelligibly. I’m having to write another meaningless explanation to Francis Hill. Isabelle told me to say to him that what he felt was just that I have lost the quality of “abandon” which I once had and which people expect to find in me. She says that if she had not seen me for three years, she would not know me now, and that it’s only because she lives with me and believes that I make an honest effort that she can still care for me and believe in me. Perhaps that will help you to understand. I think its that same quality you miss in my letters. Now I’ve written you the introspective sort of letter I hate to write—you’ll bear me witness that I seldom write much about my “feelings” now—and it takes me a whole, dreary Sunday to write it. I only hope to make you feel it is not only toward you that I have changed, but toward everyone, every thing, and most of all toward myself. Goodbye for this time, Dorothy. Let Auld Lang Syne count for as much as you can. The present is not worth talking about, so far as I’m concerned. I suppose living with an honest person like Isabelle has taught me what a sham I am—and always have been. I’ve lost a good deal. “Honest, my Lord?” Well, I’m at least trying to be that. I’ve given up living on various and manufactured excitement. It makes me dull and cross and uninteresting, but I’ll be honest if i
t takes every nerve and idea. Do you know what I mean, I wonder? I hope so.

  Willie

  I can’t, in common decency say much about the trying and complicated household in which I live, but you must realize that such conditions do not contribute to ones being oneself. There is a continual restraint necessary.

  Cather’s story “A Wagner Matinée,” about a hard-worked, discouraged Nebraska farm woman who returns to Boston for a visit and responds powerfully to an afternoon concert of Richard Wagner’s music, features bleak descriptions of Red Willow County, Nebraska. Will Owen Jones did not respond to it favorably in his Nebraska State Journal column.

  TO WILL OWEN JONES

  March 6, 1904

  Pittsburgh

  My. Dear Mr. Jones;

  That was a ringing slap you gave me in your more or less personal column. I wonder whether you really mean it, or whether it was for the benefit of the Red Willow contingent? I never even had an idea of disparaging the state. One morning last Spring I got a letter from just such a woman in Western Nebraska, that afternoon I happened to go to a Wagner matinee, and the story was all worked out before I left the hall. I simply used the farm house we used to live in and a few of my recollections of life there. It is so beastly true that my own family are quite insulted—they say it isn’t nice to tell such things.

  Now my good friend, how could I have explained that years of prosperity had followed the pioneer days, and didn’t I take the pains to date the story back in the pioneer times? A story is but a personal impression, a sort of mood, anyhow, it isn’t a real estate advertisement nor yet a “roast” for any particular locality. Perhaps it was a mistake to use the name of an actual county, I shall change that in the book proofs. This is not for publication, nor yet to protest against what you had to say—you have said so many agreeable things that I should be a very thin skinned individual if I pouted. But I should like you to know that I had no spiteful intentions and did not mean to throw any cheap slurs upon the state. I though[t] everyone admitted that those pioneer days were desolate, and I was misguided enough to think the story a sort of respectful tribute to the courage of those uncomplaining women who weathered them. Farm life in that territory when I knew it fifteen years ago was bad enough, what must it have been before?

  I have about decided to delay the publication of the “Troll Garden” until next fall, as we have arranged for serial publication for a number of the stories and they will not be cleared up until then. Maybe it will relieve you to know that the one under discussion is the only Nebraska tale in the lot.

  Willa S. Cather

  According to Edith Lewis’s 1953 memoir Willa Cather Living, she and Cather met in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the summer of 1903. Lewis worked in publishing in New York City, and when Cather visited New York after meeting her, Lewis graciously hosted her. The unfinished novel mentioned in the following letter is probably the abandoned and unpublished “Pittsburgh novel.” The “ordeal” Cather refers to is Canfield’s dissertation defense at Columbia University.

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  Saturday [probably March or early April 1904]

  My Dear Dorothy;

  It was good of you to write me what Miss Roseboro’ told you about the yarns. I hear from her occasionally, but she has said nothing about them. I am surprised to hear that you heard some good ones from her own fair hand. The only ones I have seen were ludicrous muddles of sentimentality. There was one in Scribners that was a fright, a crazy sort of condensed novel.

  You surely have my prayer for your ordeal in May. However, I cant believe that you are really apprehensive about it. You are usually pretty cocksure about anything before you allow yourself to go into it, arent you? You never struck me as a person who took chances, especially in a thing of that sort. I can understand though, how, even after the most sound preparation, you might wish it well over. Let me hear as soon as you get a verdict, please.

  I may get to Vermont this summer, for my plan is to spend the summer in New York, down near or with Edith Lewis, in Washington Square. She has been a regular trump about looking up rooms for me and such things. I want to get off somewhere and make a final struggle with this accursed underdone novel, and New York seems a good place to do it. When the thumb screws are on so hard I can’t endure it, I might be able to run up to see you for a few days and seek for sympathy. Is there a summer course in English at Columbia? I should like to take one, I think,—that is, if I’m not too much worn out when summer comes. I’ve been up to my ears in school work, altering the course, looking and writing for two new assistants. This is new work, for me, and I find it a lot of worry. It’s the first really hard pull I’ve had. Responsibility for other people’s work is certainly a cross, even when they do it pretty well. I’ve not left the school building before six at night for two weeks.

  What a villain you were to inflict my labored attempt at literary criticism upon your poor father and mother. It was absurd, I know, but then I found it hard to say just what I wanted to say, I can tell you much better than I can write it. If I can get up to Hilhouse we can thrash it all over under the peaceful brow of equinox, cant we?

  Isabelle is still wretched, her throat is bad all the time and she does not seem to gain strength at all.

  My family have moved into a big, comfortable house they have just built, and are more comfortable than they have ever been. They would like me to go home this summer to help them with the selecting of wall paper and furniture, and to admire the big lawn and fine pines and maples and locusts in which they take much pride. I’d like to go, I hate to let a year pass without seeing Elsie and Jack—I wish you could see that dear, clever, high-hearted little sister of mine—but I know I would’nt work there, and it does seem that the McClures will lose patience if I dont get this novel to them in some shape or other. Then dont you really think that I ought to get into a more stimulating atmosphere for a few months in the year? Something that will, as you say, waken me up. I almost think that I need that more than rest and quiet. I have food and sleep and regularity enough all year, I dont need that sort of rut. I think Miss Lewis would be a good pilot for me, she’s all wrapped up in her discoveries in local color.

  Let me hear what you think about it, and what your mother thinks, too. I believe New York would be next to going abroad, for me.

  Here’s hoping the best for the examination, and that all will go well with you. I’m pretty confident about that, though.

  Willie

  Dont talk about trouble until you have had to make out in detail a four year’s course of study in such a vague endless subject as English Literature & Composition! Map out the work for eight teachers!

  As Cather was preparing the final manuscript for her first book of short stories, The Troll Garden, Dorothy Canfield learned that one of the stories, “The Profile,” featured a woman with a disfiguring scar over half of her face. She was concerned that this character too closely resembled her friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met on her trip to Europe in 1902.

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  Sunday [December 18, 1904]

  My Dear Dorothy;

  I have just received your telegram, and I judge that what you wish to know about the story is in how far the woman in it resembles Miss Osbourne. I think she has nothing in common with Miss O. except that she has a scar on her face. She is addicted to loud clothes, but Miss O—’s certainly could not be put in that category. The story relates chiefly her domestic infelicities and ends with a divorce. The serious tone of your telegram rather perplexes me. A scar is not so uncommon a thing as to point directly to anyone; indeed the painter in this story marries twice and both wives have scars. They could not both be supposed to refer to Miss Osbourne, so you ought not to feel responsible—as, from your telegram I fear you may. I should be very sorry indeed to think that Miss Osbourne would take the story to herself at all, but since the women are both totally unlike her, I dont see how she reasonably could do so. If she did, I should not consider that I would
be any more to blame than if I had written the story without having seen her. I surely think you have taken the thing altogether too seriously. Your telegram sounds as though you were hurt—or indignant—and for that I am concerned, and am heartily sorry to have caused you anxiety. But why, for mercy’s sake, should you be anxious? One surely cant be held responsible for the sort of stuff ones friends see fit to write. We all have our own degrees of conscience or conscienclessness about that sort of thing. I’m sorry that I’m not going to be able to see you this week to talk it over with you, for I think I could set your mind at rest. At least dont be annoyed by it until you’ve seen it.

  Hastily

  Willa

  On New Year’s Day 1905, after reading “The Profile,” Canfield wrote to Cather and implored her not to publish the story, saying that it would be a cruel, cold-blooded thing to do.

  TO DOROTHY CANFIELD

  [About January 5, 1905]

  My Dear Dorothy;

  The proofs of the book were returned to the office some days before your letter came. The pages are now being made up, the story you ask me to withdraw occurs the third in the series and the whole collection is barely long enough to make a book. To withdraw the story would be to withdraw the volume. Perhaps that would not daunt you, but I scarcely know how one would proceed to withdraw a volume already in type. Even if one paid the cost of composition, there would still be the advertising arrangements, which I believe are already made.

  I find that I had not really expected you to rise to the pitch of asking me to withdraw it. You write with such rapidity and facility yourself that you probably forget how slow and painful a process writing is for me. When one has spent some two months of Saturdays and Sundays on a story, one has a particular interest in it, and a rather secure sense of ownership.