The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

920 Pages·2013·5.68 MB·English

by  Willa Cather

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
The letters of Willa Cather copyright © 2013 by The Willa Cather Literary Trust Introduction, annotation, commentary,
and compilation copyright © 2013 by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout All rights reserved. Published in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited,
Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
eBook ISBN: 978-0-30795931-7
Harcover ISBN: 978-0-307-959300-0
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cather, Willa, 1875–1947.
The selected letters of Willa Cather / edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
ISBN 978-0-307-95930-0 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-30795931-7 (ebook)
1. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947—Correspondence.
2. Novelists, American—20th century—Correspondence.
I. Jewell, Andrew (Andrew W.)
II. Stout, Janis P. III. Title.
PS3505.A87Z48 2013 813′.52—dc23
[B] 2012036882
Cover photograph: Willa Cather in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 1920s, probably taken by Edith Lewis. Archives and Special
Collections, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries.
Cover design by Megan Wilson Manufactured in the United States of America
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Note on Editorial Procedures
Acknowledgments
PART ONE The School Years: 1888–1896
PART TWO The Pittsburgh Years: 1896–1906
PART THREE The McClure’s Years: 1906–1912
PART FOUR Finding Herself as a Writer: 1912–1916
PART FIVE Becoming Well Known: 1916–1918
PART SIX A Change of Publishers and One of Ours: 1919–1922
PART SEVEN Years of Mastery: 1923–1927
PART EIGHT Years of Loss: 1928–1931
PART NINE A Troubled Time: 1932–1936
PART TEN Years of Grieving: 1937–1939
PART ELEVEN The Culmination of a Career: 1940–1943
PART TWELVE The Final Years: 1944–1947
Biographical Directory
Note on Archives Holding Original Cather Materials
Note on Works Cited and Consulted
Index
Photographic Credits
A Note About the Editors
Other Books by This Author
Introduction
BEFORE WILLA CATHER DIED, she did what she could to prevent this book
from ever existing. She made a will that clearly forbade all publication
of her letters, in full or in part. And now we flagrantly defy Cather’s will
in the belief that her decision, made in the last, dark years of her life and
honored for more than half a century, is outweighed by the value of
making these letters available to readers all over the world.
Why did she put such restrictions in her will? Various answers have
been proposed. Some believe that Cather was guarding her privacy,
perhaps worried that the letters she dashed off over the years, not
thinking of herself as a public figure, would compromise her literary
reputation. Some have wondered if she sought to conceal a secret buried
in her years of correspondence, some sign of an indiscretion or
uncontrolled passion. Many people, following James Woodress’s
characterization of her in Willa Cather: A Literary Life, are convinced that
Cather was obsessed with her privacy and that the will—together with
her supposed systematic collecting and burning of letters—was simply
an expression of a personality seeking to control all access to itself. Many
have believed she actually did burn all her letters, or almost all, and the
will was a kind of backstop.
Our research on Willa Cather’s letters calls into question all of these
assumptions about Cather, her character, and her motivations. Except for
an isolated incident or two, there is no evidence that she systematically
collected and destroyed her correspondence. This claim is
overwhelmingly demonstrated by the large volume of surviving
documents: about three thousand Cather letters are now known to exist,
and new caches continue to appear. If Cather or Edith Lewis, her partner
and first literary executor, really and systematically sought to destroy all
correspondence, would so many letters have survived? Moreover, at the
end of Cather’s life, people who were quite close to her and would have
undoubtedly known about any preference for wholesale destruction did
not destroy the letters in their possession; on the contrary, they were
concerned, as her niece Virginia Cather Brockway wrote, to be “very
careful of everything of Aunt Willies” and protect it from “fire or
something unexpected.”1 Indeed, some of the largest and richest
collections of existing Cather letters are those that have been protected
for decades by members of her family. The episodes of destruction that
have given rise to the supposition that Cather destroyed her letters—for
example, Elizabeth Sergeant’s report in her memoir that all of the letters
Cather wrote to her dear friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg were
shoved into her apartment’s incinerator after Hambourg’s death2—
appear to be isolated incidents rather than part of a larger pattern of
obliteration.
Nevertheless, Cather’s testamentary restriction on the publication of
her letters was clearly driven by a desire to restrict the readership of
them. We do not believe that desire emerged from a need to shield
herself or protect a secret, but instead was an act consistent with her
long-held desire to shape her own public identity. In her maturity,
Cather was a skillful self-marketer, and a major element of her
marketing strategy was to limit her publicly available texts to those she
had meticulously prepared. She did not fill shelves with hastily written
novels or fleeting topical essays, but toiled over each book until it
succeeded to the best of her ability. Sometimes she delayed the
publication of a novel by months or even years in order to achieve her
artistic goals. She even contributed to the design of the physical books,
considering each element that might communicate something of her
work to the reader. She specified her margin preferences for My Ántonia,
had ideas about the font type for Death Comes for the Archbishop, and
thwarted most efforts to create paperback editions during her lifetime.
Her strategy was extremely successful. By positioning herself not as a
“popular” writer but as a literary artist, she was able to give herself the
space to be such an artist while also financially succeeding in the
marketplace. Her lovely, quiet, episodic novel about seventeenth-century
Quebec, Shadows on the Rock, was one of the top-selling books of 1931.
It was not a success because readers were rushing to read a novel about
colonial Canada, but because the novel was written by the celebrated
author Willa Cather.
We can guess that Cather may have believed that an edition of her
letters would shift focus away from her novels and onto her private self.
She was impatient with writers who managed to sell their books by
constructing dramatic images of themselves. Although she did at times
contribute to publicity efforts by providing stories of her early life, her
goal was to create a persona that practically disappeared behind the
work; she sought to meld the art and the artist into one indivisible
package. She wrote to her brother Roscoe in 1940 that she was satisfied
to do what James M. Barrie and Thomas Hardy did: they “left no
‘representatives’ but their own books,—and that is best.”3 In this way,
the resistance to the publication of her letters was consistent with her
resistance, in her later years, to lecturing, interviews, and other forms of
exposing her self to the public.
Cather’s suppression of the publication of her letters may indeed have
helped cement her reputation as a true artist, and today that reputation
is virtually unchallenged. In the nearly seven decades since her death,
her works have continued to be read, studied, and celebrated, and both
general readers and contemporary writers as diverse as A. S. Byatt and
David Mamet celebrate her fine artistry and her absolute dedication to
her craft. And rightly so: many of Cather’s novels and stories are among
the finest writings of the twentieth century, rich and complex in their
meaning-making, yet elegant and pristine on their surfaces. She manages
both to enchant readers with her prose and to move them with her
insights into human experience.
We fully realize that in producing this book of selected letters we are
defying Willa Cather’s stated preference that her letters remain hidden
from the public eye. But even her will itself envisions a moment when
her preferences would not rule the day; acknowledging her inability to
govern publication decisions indefinitely from beyond the grave, it
leaves the decision for publication “to the sole and uncontrolled
discretion of my Executors and Trustee.”4 Observing this part of Cather’s
will, Norman Holmes Pearson noted more than half a century ago that
the document recognizes “certain difficulties in regard to the future.”
“The future must make its own decisions,” he wrote. “All Miss Cather
could do was to make the future as remote as possible.”5
The concerns that we believe motivated her to assert her preference
are no longer valid. Cather’s reputation is now as secure as artistic
reputations can ever be, and her works will continue to speak for
themselves. These lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage
her reputation. Instead, we can see from our twenty-first-century
perspective that her letters heighten our sense of her complex
personality, provide insights into her methods and artistic choices as she
worked, and reveal Cather herself to be a complicated, funny, brilliant,
flinty, sensitive, sometimes confounding human being. Such an identity
is far more satisfying—and more honest—than that of a “pure” artist,
unmoved by commercial motivations, who devoted herself strictly to her
creations and nothing else.
In the past—unless they were lucky enough to have sufficient
resources of time and money to travel to the almost seventy-five archives
that house the letters themselves—readers and scholars interested in
Cather’s life and works were able to read only summaries and
paraphrasings of her letters, not her actual words. Having ourselves
summarized thousands of letters for the original or the expanded
Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather, we can attest to the inadequacy of
such paraphrases. Substituting our words (or anyone else’s) for Cather’s
own expressions of her meaning is never satisfactory. Secondhand
approximations can never precisely convey what she said herself. Could
a summary ever communicate the cheeky, alliterative fun of a postscript
like “Fremstad flees on Friday to the inclement wood of Maine,” at the
end of a 1914 letter to Elizabeth Sergeant?6 Cather’s restrictions in her
will, then, by making paraphrases the only option available to scholars
and biographers, created a situation that even Cather herself would
surely consider far worse than the publication of her letters. Readers
have been forced to encounter what she “said” in her letters through
words supplied by scholars seeking to convey what they understood her
to mean. Now we will all be able to read and interpret her letters for
ourselves. We will also be able to draw more accurate connections
between the letters and the fiction. By forcing a delay of many years in
publishing a volume of her letters, Cather’s restrictions did, however,
ensure that there is no longer any possibility of harming or embarrassing
the people who appear in her correspondence.
Cather is now a part of our cultural history. Her works belong to
something greater than herself. It is time to let the letters speak for
themselves.