edited by andrew jewell and janis stout
knopf, 752 pages, $37.50
One might be forgiven for feeling some ambivalence inopening this volume, the first-ever publication of the personal correspondenceof Willa Cather, the writer who moved from the Nebraska prairie to Pittsburgh,to Greenwich Village, and into the literary pantheon. Editors Andrew Jewell andJanis Stout acknowledge the prospect of this unease in the first lines of theirintroduction: “Before Willa Cather died, she did what she could to prevent thisbook from ever existing. She made a will that clearly forbade all publicationof her letters, in full or in part. And now we flagrantly defy Cather’s will.”
What justifies this disregard is Cather’s vital presence inthis far-ranging correspondence. Arranged chronologically and grouped intotwelve sections, her letters appear in their entirety minus presumably largebodies of letters, to Cather’s two closest friends (more than friends, somesay), that were likely destroyed. Helpful editorial bridges provide necessarycontext, as often Cather is responding to unprinted letters she has received.
Cather’s correspondence shares the same moral core of hernovels and stories: Hers are letters of deep affection and understanding.Tender, enduring relationships appear again and again. Having lost her fatherand then, in 1930, standing by as her mother’s condition deteriorated, shewrites to commiserate with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who had just lost hermother: “These vanishings, that come one after another, have such animpoverishing effect upon those of us who are left—our world suddenly becomesso diminished—the landmarks disappear and all the splendid distances behind usclose up. These losses, one after another, make one feel as if one were goingon in a play after most of the principal characters are dead.”
Cather took things to heart, both her experience and that ofothers. During the Dust Bowl she provided coffee, clothing, toys, and boxes offruit to friends and former neighbors in Nebraska, even going so far as to paythe interest on their farm mortgages: “I got off all my Christmas boxes to myold women on the farms out west. For three of them, thank God, I have been ableto save their farms by paying their interest. About nothing ever gave me suchpleasure as being able to help them keep their land—the land they’ve worked onsince I was ten years old!”
Writing to Irene Miner Weisz in 1945 (to whom, along withIrene’s sister, Carrie, she had dedicated My Antonia), she describes avisit with her brother Roscoe: “The three summers I spent in Wyoming with himand his wife were among the happiest of my life. Now I don’t care about writingany more books. Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people welove.”
Given the prominence of Roman Catholic history, characters,and attitudes in her fiction, Cather often found it necessary to remind correspondentsthat she was not a Roman Catholic. In early adulthood she placed her greatestfaith in art: “There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; thats mycreed and I’ll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if needbe. Its not an affectation, its my whole self.”
Later, following her confirmation in the Episcopal Church in1922, she wrote: “I am a Protestant, but not a narrow minded one. If you make afair minded study of history you cannot be narrow. What organization was it thatkept the teachings of Jesus Christ alive between the year 300 a.d. and thedays of Martin Luther?”
To Read Bain, a sociology professor, she writes: “I do notregard the Roman Church merely as ‘artistic material.’ If the external form andceremonial of that Church happens to be more beautiful than that of otherchurches, it certainly corresponds to some beautiful vision within. It issacred, if for no other reason than that is the faith that has been most lovedby human creatures, and loved over the greatest stretch of centuries.”
During the last decades of her life, Cather began to lamentthe cultural decline she saw in America and the devastation brought on by WorldWar II. A sense of loss pervades many of the later letters. To Tomáš Masaryk, a founder and president ofCzechoslovakia, she complains, “We live in a strange world, at a strange time.. . . We behave as though we could create a new scale of values by the mere actof besmirching the old.”
At times she seems to want to flee the modern world for asafer place, a more ordered time. How fortunate fellow writer Zoë Akins is, sheexclaims, to be able to retreat to her secluded home: “It always brings mepeace to think that when the world is full of misery and madness, you can shutyourself up there and forget that the heritage of all the ages is beingthreatened.” To Viola Roseboro, the fiction editor at McClure’s, shewonders, “Why on earth do we, in all the countless stretch of years, just inour little moment, have to witness everything laid waste?”
Scholars will make good use of the opportunity this volumeprovides to quote Cather’s own words rather than make do with paraphrases.Still, at a time when privacy and discretion count for so little, one can’treally be faulted for feeling some regret that Willa Cather’s privatecorrespondence has become a public commodity. As she admonished Cyril Clemens,editor of the Mark Twain Quarterly, regarding public demands for detailsabout a personal visit with poet A. E. Housman: “One’s memories, after all, areone’s own, and if one relates them to the public one prefers to do it in one’sown way.”
Christopher S. Busch is professor of English at Hillsdale College.
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