“I long ago made my decision about the question of dramatization [of my works], and it is absolute and final,” wrote Willa Cather in 1936 to playwright and screenwriter Zoe Akins. And up until now, her words were exactly that — final.
Not so anymore: While the copyrights on Cather’s stories have been under the tightest lock-and-key for decades, the death of Charles Cather in 2011 meant that the last link to Willa’s final wishes had been severed. Cather’s copyrights were passed to the Willa Cather Trust and the Willa Cather Foundation, and the bans on film rights as well as quotations and the publication of her letters were dropped (Richard Brody of the New Yorker remarked that he’s now awaiting an adaptation of “My Mortal Enemy.” “‘My Antonia’ by Terrence Malick,” Erik Lundegaard replied, which actually sounds about right).
In this day and age, it seems as if no secrets are sacred anymore. Literary history is crowded with recluses, from Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson, who never wanted their works published, to perhaps the most notorious of all, J.D. Salinger (Salinger’s own door of privacy is to be kicked down later this year in a tell-all documentary and biography). And as of next week, Cather’s curtain is being pulled aside for the publication of “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather,” a revealing collection edited by Cather scholars Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.
The collection of letters is not the usual back-and-forth with the great writers of the day: rather, the conversations are all one-sided correspondences from Cather exclusively, sent to various relatives, business relations and friends. “The Selected Letters” as a volume is mammoth, an anthology of 566 of the estimated 3,000 or so letters signed by Cather. It is an intimidating 750 pages in length.
The editors wisely have done their best to remain absent in the collection, with the exception of the occasional note for contextualization. They only admit that their selected letters were chosen to outline Cather’s careers in fiction and journalism, her perspectives on the issues of the day (including both world wars, the sinking of the Titanic, Mexican-Americans and the blossoming of new movements in arts and culture) and her relationships with key figures in her life. Jewell and Stout have also chosen to retain misspellings, for the volume starts around the time Cather was 14 and continues onward to her death, giving it something of a narrative arc via her literary and letter-writing refinements.
Cather was private her entire life (the majority of which was spent in New York City) and never wanted any attention for her work, even after winning a Pulitzer Prize for “One of Ours.” Once featured on the cover of Time magazine, fame was never something she would settle into or be comfortable with. In fact, up until the announcement of this new collection, many believed that Cather had burned all her correspondences prior to her death, to ensure her privacy remained respected eternally.
Jewell and Stout reject this claim in their introduction, saying evidence of her letter-burning is scarce. However, Cather undoubtedly did everything she could to have prevented the publication of something such as “The Selected Letters.” She insisted her readers take a structuralist approach to her works, although various parties would later lay claim to Cather as being one of their own. Catholic criticism championed Cather for her attention to religious aesthetics (although Cather herself was not Catholic) in the same way that feminists would claim Cather as their own in the 1970s. Cather, who called herself “William” as a child and is understood by scholars to have likely been homosexual, would also be meticulously traced, referenced and criticized with an eye for sexual repression.
Cather was never interested in what women were supposed to be interested in; rather, it was the male world that Cather wanted to write about. Her concerns were with travel, adventure, risk and work — especially the work of an artist. Her letters, too, are rich in business interactions and she was often in touch with Alfred A. Knopf about her various sales and publications (“The Selected Letters,” fittingly, is also published by Knopf).
Cather herself fell into history during a time of literary celebrity, despite her opposition to it from the start. Her contemporaries, of course, were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce and Stein, although she was about two decades older than them when she was writing. As the New York Times describes Cather’s position, she was a “literary celebrity who was born in the age of Twain and lived almost into the age of Mailer and Pynchon.” Few authors, indeed, can brag of being so truly American: Born in Virginia, raised in rural Nebraska, later a Chicagoan, New Yorker and visitor to the West, Cather not only saw a great swath of the century but also saw a great swath of the nation.
Indeed, even her influence was far-reaching. Known to have been an enormous inspiration to F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the gems in “Selected Letters” is her reply in the spring of 1925 when he expressed nervousness that his newest novel, “The Great Gatsby,” borrowed too closely from Cather’s novella, “A Lost Lady.”
“I have read and hugely enjoyed your book before I got your letter, and I honestly had not thought of ‘A Lost Lady’ when I read that passage you now call to my attention,” Cather assured him.
(While Fitzgerald owed his masterpiece to Cather’s protagonist, Marian Forrester, Hemingway infamously disparaged Cather’s attempts to describe war, calling them scenes out of “Birth of a Nation.”)
Perhaps the greatest treats of all in “Selected Letters” are Cather’s two correspondences to Edith Lewis. Despite the assertion that Cather did not burn letters to cover her tracks — even the tracks of her romantic life — the “Selected Letters” editors admit there are only two surviving letters from Cather to Lewis, the woman she would live with for much of her life.
The first correspondence, a postcard sent from the Lourve, remarks on Jusepe de Ribera’s “Adoration of the Shepherds.” The other is a full letter dated “Sunday 4:30pm” from New Hampshire where, with dreamy vocabulary, Cather describes sitting in Lewis’ room and watching the stars.
“I don’t know when I have enjoyed Jupiter so much as this summer,” she wrote as a postscript. If this is evidence of their romance, then one cannot doubt that it was truly a beautiful one.
However, for someone looking for a more blatantly titillating reveal of Cather’s most personal secrets, “Selected Letters” is not it. In fact, much of the collection only affirms what scholars had, up until this point, been forced to paraphrase: Cather was lively, humorous, opinionated and very much a part of the society and business in which she had chosen to devote her life. In fact, it is rather unfortunate that she had willed her letters into secrecy, for, if anything, they only breathe life into the character she is already understood to be.
Ethics aside, if “Selected Letters” tells us something profound about Cather, it is this: She was too active, too interesting and too alive to keep herself a secret forever. It has always been inevitable that, one day, in one way or another, this would be proven in Cather’s own words.
(Photo: Craig Chandler/ University Communications)
