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Entirely Personal
Willa Cather really didn’t want me to read her letters. And she was hoping you would mind your own business as well.
I know this because I just committed a serious violation of her privacy, reading the more than 500 letters amassed in “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather,” edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, and published despite the author’s repeated, explicit wishes to the contrary. “I never allow quotations from personal letters to be printed,” she wrote to a correspondent in 1936, and it was a position from which she never deviated. To another, she wrote, “One’s memories, after all, are one’s own, and if one relates them to the public one prefers to do it in one’s own way.”
In their introduction, the editors admit they’ve defied Cather’s will (in both the legal and personal senses), but assure us they’ve done so with the best of intentions, hoping to liberate Cather’s actual words from the shackles of scholarly paraphrase: “Now we will all be able to read and interpret her letters for ourselves.” They also suggest the statute of limitations on the author’s personal preference has expired: “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.”
I don’t disagree with them, though I did find the reading experience uncomfortable, especially when I bumped up against one of Cather’s frequent declarations that she considers her letters “entirely personal and confidential,” or her request that a correspondent “just put them in the furnace, I shall be greatly obliged to you.” Ethics aside, Jewell and Stout have performed a valuable service with this book, from which Cather emerges as a strong and vivid presence, a woman at once surprisingly modern and touchingly — if not always sweetly — old-fashioned. What devoted reader of Cather’s fiction wouldn’t want to know the exact words she used to compare herself with a contemporary male novelist named David Graham Phillips: “I used to think ‘you big stuffed-shirt-and-checked pants, I know more about the real West than you do, but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts and don’t shave’ ”? Is there a Cather scholar who wouldn’t be tickled to read her letter to Annie Pavelka, the woman on whom she based the title character of “My Ántonia”: “I am so happy that you got an electric washing machine with the $55 I sent you at Christmas. But the full price of the washer was $65, and I want to pay for it all. Therefore, I am enclosing a check for $10 to make up to you what you paid out, and now you can call it ‘Willie’s Washer’ ”?
Cather’s lesbianism and its effect on her writing has been the focus of an extraordinary amount of academic attention in recent decades — along with Henry James, she’s a favorite subject of queer theorists interested in the way an author’s sexuality gets repressed and revealed in his or her fiction — but readers coming to these letters to learn the truth about Cather’s romantic life will be disappointed. Very few of her letters to Isabelle McClung Hambourg, the Pittsburgh socialite widely considered the love of her life, or to Edith Lewis, the advertising copywriter who was her “companion and housemate for nearly 40 years,” have survived, and none of those included here contain any shocking or even revealing information. Only one letter, written to a childhood friend in 1893, when Cather was 19 and deeply smitten by a college classmate named Louise Pound, gives us a glimpse of the passionate, disarmingly candid young woman she must have been: “I am pretty well now, save for sundry bruises received in driving a certain fair maid over the country with one hand, sometimes, indeed, with no hand at all. But she did not seem to mind my method of driving, even when we went off banks and over haystacks, and as for me — I drive with one hand all night in my sleep.” It’s an astonishing and illuminating moment — Cather reports this to her friend without the slightest trepidation, as if her sexual orientation is a well-established fact, not to mention the identity of the “fair maid” — but Cather seems to have accepted the need for discretion soon afterward. At any rate, there’s nothing even remotely like this confession in the 50-plus years of correspondence that follow.
What these letters illustrate so beautifully is the literary journey of Willa Cather, the turn-of-the-century career woman and artist, chronicling her eastward migration from Nebraska to Pittsburgh, where she worked for The Home Monthly magazine (“Of course it’s a little hard for me to write gentle home and fireside stuff, but I simply will do it”), and then to New York and the influential McClure’s Magazine, where she eventually became managing editor. It was a heady time for the young writer, during which she made the acquaintance of H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and Sarah Orne Jewett, among others, and published her first novel, a Jamesian exercise called “Alexander’s Bridge” that she later renounced.
The great turning point for Cather came in 1912, when she traveled to the Southwest and realized that the region she had tried so desperately to flee as a young woman was, for better or worse, the place that had the deepest hold on her imagination: “The West always paralyzes me a little. When I am away from it I remember only the tang on the tongue. But when I come back [I] always feel a little of the fright I felt when I was a child. I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is.” A few months later, when she returned to Red Cloud, Neb., all of her ambivalence was gone. The sense of homecoming struck her with the force of an epiphany — “The whole great wheat country fairly glows, and you can smell the ripe wheat as if it were bread baking” — and filled her with artistic purpose, a sense that she’d finally found her subject. Within months, she’d completed “O Pioneers!” — the book she considered her true first novel — and launched a meteoric career that would bring her enormous fame; countless honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923; and an enduring place in our literary pantheon. With novels like “My Ántonia,” “The Song of the Lark” and “A Lost Lady,” Cather helped to create a distinctively Western style — laconic, low-key, deceptively lyrical — that influenced generations of writers to come, including Wallace Stegner, Alice Munro and the Richard Ford of “Rock Springs” and “Canada.”
Despite her success, Cather herself remains a somewhat obscure figure, far less alive in the American cultural imagination than contemporaries like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She’s frumpy and rural; they’re dashing and cosmopolitan. They ushered in the Jazz Age, reinventing literature and helping to transform American society, forging myths of masculinity and reckless youth that haven’t faded, while she remained stubbornly turned toward the past, nostalgic for her prairie childhood, increasingly uncomfortable with the country that emerged after World War I and with the literary modernism that defined the era. But that image doesn’t do justice to the complexity of Cather’s life or to the magnitude of her achievement. As a pure prose stylist, she ranks with Hemingway; as a self-made American artist and feminist pioneer, she traveled a far greater distance — from tiny Red Cloud to Manhattan — than Fitzgerald did when he made the leap from middle-class St. Paul to Princeton. These letters bring her fuzzy image into much sharper focus, and for that we owe Jewell and Stout a debt of gratitude, and Willa Cather a sincere apology.
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLA CATHER
Edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout
Illustrated. 715 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50.
Tom Perrotta’s new story collection, “Nine Inches,” will be published in the fall.
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