come just, but barely, in time. It was impossible to believe,
even with the German army only fifty miles from Paris as it was
again in the summer of 1918, that this exquisite city in her
summer radiance; with all her boulevards and avenues empty of
traffic and people; and her great monuments shining in every
vista would be destroyed or entered by an alien force.

EMERGENCE

(WHITE SPACE)

[ Emerson's adage "Things are of the snake" applied in war-time Paris. I heard from Willa, but did not keep any letters. I lived in small quarters. ]

Before I went Randolph Bourne had reproached me sharply
for not retiring to write a novel in some Western or New England
retreat where War could be forgotten. [He himself died, still
young, of influenza that war winter in New York.] Willa Cather uttered no reproach; she clearly realized that I
had to go. She was herself however in no wise drawn to do any-
thing but get on with her new story. Before I left, I had the
comfort of knowing that she had made her first connection with
Jaffrey, New Hampshire which was to prove, in a final sense, a
new writing centre; a replacement of her Pittsburgh refuge.

Two old friends of Pittsburgh days had a hand in it.
They had rented from Mrs. James Harvey Robinson, for the summer
of 1917 and again in 1918, a charming house called High Mowing
which has a sweeping view of Mount Monadnock: very much the same
view that Miss Cather's grave in the old cemetery commands today.

Her answer, she told him, [derived] from their mutual love of
High Mowing, and from the fact that *My Antonia* had a real
connection with the place where it was--in part--written.
Jaffrey people, by the way have noted a number of their local
proper names applied to Black Hawk characters.

Willa made the point [to her correspondent] that in general
she never talked of her writing as she was doing it; her young
correspondent was, then, the "first" to know what pages were
written in the tent.

Was [My Antonia] then, (I asked myself in 1950 when I read
this comment) a real turning point of literary maturity, when
encouragement or criticism from without became beside the point?
Certainly I had received many disclosures about the writing of
her first three novels. I was separated geographically from her
during the writing of *My Antonia*, which she completed in New York
in the winter of 1917-1918, my crucial first winter in beleagured
Paris (Air raids driving us into the wine cellar of the Hotel de
France et Choiseul. The American Army on the Boulevards, making
the cocottes cry and throw red roses. The Big Bertha dropping
pot shots into streets and a famous sanctuary.)

Certainly I was to know much less, as time passed, of
what Willa had "in the works". She did not make epistolary
contemplative disclosures so often. But she did when I saw her, sometimes
suddenly unburden herself.

(WHITE SPACE)

Invisio
as it were,
Mixing the following suspended summer of 1918, when the
Boches swept over the Marne again and dug in fifty miles from
Paris, where I continued to live and write: during the uncertain
and bloody fortunes of the Meuse-Argonne battle, when our A.E.F.
gave all for victory, Willa was engrossed at last in her new
story, "One of Ours." The proof sheets of "My Antonia" were hardly
dry but she was working again in the Jaffrey tent. It went less
well, this time. There were heavy rains and cold and she caught
the flu. on her who book. had lost her heart to a
"(nemo)",

In Paris I was waiting longingly for a copy of *My Antonia*.
Ferris Greenslet, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, sent me an
early one to the American Hospital of Paris, where I found myself
bedded down for seven months of care, infection and recuperation
after a critical war accident that brought my correspondence for
the N.R. to an abrupt conclusion.
end here?

(WHITE SPACE)

With what eagerness I held this incomparable book in my
hands as Dakin's solution dripped into my war fractures. Just
to skim a page or two, to get the American measure and flow,
the candor and newness was better than a sedative to calm my
pain.

When I was able to read rather than just feel a beat,
I was absorbed—for I had missed my friend in Paris—in the
autobiographical elements of the book. Willa would never write
a novel of her early life in the first person. But as I read

My Antonia, I learned far more than she had ever recounted about Willa's early experience from the point where, for her, Virginia ended, with an interminable railroad journey "across the great midland plain of North America." The platform where a boy from Virginia alighted in the dark of night, was obviously the same on which platform the embalmed corpse of the sculptor was set down, in that very early story. The Bohemian Shimerdas with their four children were huddled there too, ready to fare forth to the sod hutch, almost cave in which they were destined to suffer severe such hardships and sorrows, as did the suicide of a father. (or Willie his twin-sister) riding in his grandfather Burden's wagon box in the cold dark night looked for creeks, rivers, fences, a mountain ridge against the sky. All he made out was "land not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made. the dome of heaven all there was of it."

I looked sharply to find Antonia, (the "My" in the title indicated that she belonged to somebody) as Willa forecast her to me; as a beautiful object in the middle of a table, which could be viewed from all sides and in varying lights. At first the story did not seem at all like that. The background was full and rich. There were other farm girls, besides Antonia, the oldest Shimerda, became hired girls in Black Hawk. All were described in terms of character and individual experience, through interweaving themes and detailed scenes in genre painting.

Willa had told me that the story "wrote itself" and that it had no plot. But if it had no plot it had a framework and-- in itself a contrivance--a narrator. Jim Burden was presented

informally to the reader in this role, in an introduction where
he is seen to be intellectual and urban, a railroad lawyer with
an unhappy personal life. (This story was wisely cut short in
a later edition.) The memories of a pioneering experience at
his grandmother's homestead that came to him by an accident of
fate at an age of acute sensibility, and lasted until he went
East to study law, are the stuff of the story. Like Antonia,
Jim Burden's observations and perceptions had been sharpened
and pointed by his migration from a more mellow region to the
vast, inchoate, hardly tamed land of Nebraska.

Jim would not have fallen in love with a woman like
Alexandra Bergson, with her masculine vision and her power to
"dominate", as the South Carolinians say, the land of her in-
heriting and increasing. Alexandra was as strong as the Vir-
ginian pioneers: could rival or surpass them. But Antonia was
simply and lustily contained in the country of her Bohemian
parents' choosing. Her role was so primeval, and so much
woman's whether she plowed for her brother or cooked for Mrs.
Harling in Black Hawk, that a detached lonely boy could think
of her in the confused terms of a youthful projection of love
and nature blended which psychologically contains all aspects
of woman.

The first time Jim returned to the prairie after he
went East he found Antonia, slaving on her brother's farm with
a baby by a brakeman who had betrayed her. She was thin from
farm work and still but twenty-four.

"Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of anyone else in
this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you
for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister -- anything that a woman can be to a man. The

idea of you is part of my mind; you influence
my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds
of times when I don't realize it. You are
really a part of me."

Anything a woman can be to a man? That the reader
doubts. If so why had not Jim and Antonia loved and married
why did not this happen now? Both were young and free. No,
Antonia was a big sister, or a kind of great earth mother, a
symbol so central to Jim's heart that he cherished her inside,
within himself, and surrounded her figure with a bright concentration of insight, a gentle clarity like the early morning or
sunset light on prairie and cornfields.

Twenty years later he came back to discover that his
Antonia has married a kind negligible husband who had given
her a nestful of happy children.

"She was a battered woman now not a lovely
girl; but she still had that something which
fires the imagination, could still stop one's
breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that
somehow revealed the meaning in common things."

Antonia's passionate final and complete involvement with
her surroundings is contrasted with the tender compassionate
and semi-detached mood of the observer, the oblique reflector
of the **femme eternelle**.

The story, I saw, was dedicated to Carrie and Irene
Miner, childhood friends of Willa's in Red Cloud: "in
memory of affections old and true." The Miners were neighbors
of the Cathers. It was no secret in Willa's home town that she
had drawn an exact portrait in Mrs. Harling her only exact
portrait she said later--of the musical wife of the local grain
merchant and store-keeper, who was born in Christiania, Ote

and had taken Antonia as a hired girl. Mrs. Miner had died dur-
ing the writing of the novel and Willa besolved to keep her in life:

"Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-
looking, like her house. Every inch of her was
charged with an energy that made itself felt
the moment she entered a room. Her face was
rosy and solid, with bright, twinking eyes and
a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger,
quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of
her soul... Her rapid footsteps shook her own
floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference
wherever she came..."

The "recurrences" in this story are striking and ren-
dered in final terms. Old Mr. Shimerda, with his homesickness
for the musical life and the cafes of the old world, his sub-
jection by his hard son, Anton, his burial at the barren cross-
roads, is a piercing portrait of an American immigrant in whom
the will to live did not persist against intolerable odds. I
was happy in Paris when I found the substance of that delicate
sketch of boyhood, "The Enchanted Bluff" distilled into the
finer essence of the hired girls' picnic on the river bluff —
a noontday dream full of fascination.

Later Willa would say delightedly after a trip to
Red Cloud: "I saw Antonia — she..." A story had not detracted
from a friendship — rather added to it. Antonia's "real"
name was Annie Pavelka.

(WHITE SPACE)

137

ies. She had returned to New York just before the Armistice.

She went back to her own scalp poisoning which had brought her so much pain and psychic revolt: it had helped her to understand my plight. She said she thought this War was fated to register in my flesh and bone, so it had in my heart and mind. She was happy that *My Antonia* had reached me from F. O. She had meant to send me a copy, herself but-- as usual--when she corrected proofs the novel had seemed to her but a grey and chilly thing.

Then her letter sprang forward, every word so alive that it jumped from the page, describing the returned troops. The Mauretania had brought the first five thousand in December. Now one met "Ours" everywhere--in hotels, restaurants, on Broadway where a new form of French seemed to be taking root, as in England after The Norman Conquest. *Vive le France, for instance!* The newspapers and the Tammany mayor put on a lot of side about the soldiers, and how America had won the War. But the doughboys were not like that, themselves--they were sure they did not win the War, and they hid their decorations--for instance a *Croix de Guerre*--under their great coats, for fear they would be pricked by expassions by

They were so surprisingly poignant, vivid, vital, alive! These rapturous, farvid sentences gave me the final assurance that Willa's book now underway concerned our soldiers.

(WHITE SPA 65)

In May 1919 I walked off the gang-plank of the old
Rochambeau, on two sticks, into the arms of friends and relatives.
My sister Katharine was by then established in New York with her
husband--who had returned from France before I did--and her
little girl. A day or two later Katharine and I were having tea
with Willa Cather in Central Park.

"The wistaria is in bloom at the Casino!" she had
exclaimed. So our reunion took place at a skimpy little iron
table outside the rambling old trellised building where the
hanging violet-blue wistaria clusters seemed part of the Victorian
age. [This building disappeared long since, leaving the Central
Park searcher for atmosphere and quiet to talk regretful.]

There is a photograph of Willa, taken in 1924 by Nicholas
Muray that matches my memory of how she looked that sweet
spring day: a standing picture in an embroidered coat, with her
two hands resting on her hips and her eager, happy dedicated head
thrust forward. Her way of delivering herself completely to the
situation of a little party she was giving and of making a friend
feel welcomed was most charming. The warm, assertive, direct
outgoing side of her nature still came up from the depths of her
distance to meet an occasion.

But it was soon evident that she was greatly involved
in her soldier book, so greatly that one cup of tea had scarce
been drunk before her questions started. She "wanted to know",
with that eye-in-every-pore quality that took possession of her,

- 138 -

to the exclusion of social feeling, when she was bent on her own ends.

I"wanted to tell", of course, but like all returned soldiers--and I felt like one--I did not know how to bridge the gap between her idealized war vision that was to show up soon in *One of Ours*--and my own stark impressions of war as *lived*; of boisterous France as overrun by the *cosmopolites* trans-Atlantics and trans-Pacifics.

Of course the British Tommy, a European, worn, austere, poor in money, was discreet in Paris.. I began. But her blank stare stopped me in my tracks..

Then there was the fact that I had been very ill and was facing a lot of more trouble with the orthopœic doctors; and that I had myself started a book, [oh just a little one] in the American Hospital of Paris. It was the journal of a wounded woman, who sees the Armistice and the Peace Conference vicariously through her visitors at the hospital.

Could I speak of it? I just did, perhaps vociferously for my sister with light irony has recalled that afternoon as one in which two writers insisted on talking of their own books.

One of the matters Willa wanted information about was "shell shock". I was able to describe a nervous case who was quite well but had lost his memory and his hearing. I had seen him at Savenay, a dismal American base hospital near a muddy little French village. And *whom did I come on there but Alexander* and *future wit* Woolcott, the former drama critic of *The New York Times*, *attired* in the hideously unbecoming garb of a hospital orderly.

160.

15-5

Woollcott had asked me to have dinner with him in the village and what did we have? A wonderful wine, and Crêpes Suzette...

Willa was delighted with that story.

to hear of good news but asked whether a shell shock...

I tried to tell her of the great contribution to the...

-- Which I had heard of at the American Hospital by Paris.

subject of nervous war-cases made by Dr. Thomas Salmon, chief consultant in psychiatry of the A.E.F. -- the first psychiatrist honored in any army. He would hold sessions with soldiers who had retreated out of fear -- sit up all night with any one individual soldier, three people being present -- himself, the devil, and the soldier -- and win out over the devil. Dr. Salmon and Dr. Alfred E. Cohn of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, had noticed a nervous heart disease, which proved curable as it was not organic. All this was long ago, you see. I did not yet know Dr. Salmon but his reputation proved him one of our great war leaders... I told Willa.

I had also brought her a couple of volumes of a "new" French writer of whom I'd first heard in Paris, from Jean Giraudoux. He was named Marcel Proust: "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu": "Du Côté de Chez Swann" was a rare thing, a new kind of French psychological novel -- more than Jamesian. Giraudoux had told me that Proust lived in a padded room, frequented the salons of the **haute bourgeoisie**, and was surely the original of the little boy who became the eye and the ear recording the story.

Willa knew that I had translated a book of Giraudoux's, "Lectures pour Une Ombre", when he was in Cambridge with General Joffre, teaching the military art to Harvard students. A career diplomat, he had been more than once severely wounded. So he

-140-

was in Paris in 1917, when I got there: used to take me for walks in the *vieux quartiers* and lunches in perfect little unfashionable restaurants, remote from the *quartiers Americains*.

Willa was always happy to know of new French authors, whom she preferred to new American authors. There was Proust and also one André Maurois, whom my friend Daniel Halevy had recommended. Maurois had written one or two novels of his province--he came of a family of manufacturers--and as he spoke liaison English was, like Halevy, attached to the English Army as a officer. Result: Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, a delicious little book that dared to be satirical about the British, even in war-time.

But Willa, crumbling her brioche, was back with her own book, over our last cup of tea. No story she had ever written drove her so hard as this one, she let me know, and she was, as always at this season, eager to escape from New York. It seems to me that she was going to Jaffrey and had arranged for rooms on the third floor of The Shattuck Inn (outside the old village. The owners were thoughtful and understanding about her mornings; no foot would trample overhead. This was a great consideration with her by now. The Hambourgs were going to live near Paris, but she would feel at home in Jaffrey.

Katharine and I had spent summers in Dublin; we knew The Ark, at the foot of a steep trail to the peak of Monadnock, could sympathize with Willa's love for the walks and climbs that her energetic physical being demanded in the afternoons.

(But I would never climb another mountain. Maybe not even a hill. Neither Katharine nor Willa knew that yet.)

I was bound for Chocorua, much closer to the White

MEX

- 141 -

Mountains then Jeffrey. I hoped to stay late, late into the fall, for those last lingering days of Northern New England beauty--when the boarders went back to the city; and the maples flamed; and the birds suddenly stopped singing; and the air was frosty; and one saw a flash of tawny deer-color under the pines.

Willa and I shared the passion for such days. She had no sympathy with my new enthusiasm, The League of Nations. But landscape and weather, books and writing made us cling together.

1920--1923

End and a Beginning.

Willa Cather has been widely quoted as saying of 1920 that the World broke in two, in this year, and she belonged to the earlier half. The statement seemed paradoxical, for Willa was full of creative ardor, very well, very productive, and steadily gaining in literary reputation.

In 1920 moreover she took a step certainly leading to the future and professionally speaking, a major one. She transferred from Houghton Mifflin, the old Boston firm that had been she between 1912 and 1918, published her first four novels, to A. A. Knopf who was still relatively young in the publishing world. I gathered that her decision had something to do with her going less and less to Boston. The neighborhood of Beacon Hill, with both Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields lost from Charles Street, brought up nostalgic memories. Moreover, Ferris Greenslet, her admirer, editor, "discoverer" on Park Street had been away frequently in Europe in the War years and the aftermath. It was--so he told me--during one of these absences that the "divorce" took place. Houghton Mifflin retained the rights to the early novels, and

from time to time new editions were published; sometimes with
important prefaces.

Willa talked to me frankly about her shift and spoke
of Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche in terms of high-eulogy.
The fact that these "young people", just out of Columbia
University, had started a publishing house, with almost no
capital but their brains, their courage and their literary
taste, excited and stimulated her. They had built up a reputa-
tion and a success in which the values she most cherished--the
literary values, not the wide-sale values--were supreme. She
respected their taste. The House of Knopf grew in fame with
her own fame; Willa never, I am sure, regretted her decision.
It was a final commitment on both sides, and that fact, in itself,
made for success for both author and publisher.

Before long there appeared three brief pages, printed
in *The Borzoi*, the broadside of her new publishing house: *The
Art of Fiction*. This pregnant little essay is now included in
the posthumous *Willa Cather on Writing*:

The quintessential point made was that art should simplify:

"That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the
higher artistic process; finding what conventions
of form and what detail one can do without and yet
preserve the spirit of the whole--so that all one
has suppressed and cut away is there to the
reader's consciousness as much as if it were in
type on the page."

A first-rate picture or a first-rate novel, equally, must
have in it the strength of many sketches, many stories that have
been sacrificed to it. Writing may be the manufacture of stories
as a commodity for the market, or it may be an art:

"which is always a search for something for which there is no market, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once--nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture."

Her own strongest early influences had been Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett. Were they to be wholly discarded? I did not believe it. But what was the new and untried path to be?

The only noticeable change in Willa's first Knopf book, "Youth and the Bright Medusa," published in the autumn of 1920, was one of tone. "My Antonia" was warm and glowing. The new book was dry, almost sardonic at times. Not quite satirical.

Willa had seen too much of singers to idealise them, but this was not the case. The first singer story, (my own favorite) had, to be sure, a romantic tinge left over from the good old artist days in Washington Square, when horses drew the buses and a handsome young cantatrice, her name not yet on the billboards, could have her love affair with a painter not yet known to fame either. But the two Cressida Garnett stories disenchanted some with a voice but no musical intelligence revealed a woman/pushed from behind by a designing Svengali-like accompanist and devoured by a train of family leeches. "The Gold Slipper" lightly derided the rich stuffy, dense Pittsburgh business man in relation to music and a fascinating singer.

These stories were severely chosen from a considerable number of magazine stories that Willa had published since she left

McClure's. She did not hold all she wrote *currently* worth preserving. Her selection of the four angry early stories from "The Troll Garden" with their youthful protest to complete a collection dealing in general with artists and the artistic impulse was *brilliantly* sagacious. At present *The Sculptor's Funeral* (one of the four) is the only story of hers that may be printed in anthologies.

(WHITE SPACE)

For three years Willa and I had barely met face to face. During the full decade I had known her, her base being New York and mine New England, letters had been as significant to me as meetings. Now, about Christmas time in 1920, I moved to New York to stay, and settled for two years with a friend at 56 West Tenth Street, only a few zig-zag blocks away from Number Five Bank Street.

In Katherine Ludington's *delicious* little Victorian front parlor, there were bright coal fires in the grate, as there were at Number Five Bank Street. Willa *who* had sometimes "trundled her own" in a wheel-barrow, during the War *and who* complained loudly of food substitutes--think of carrot marmalade, for instance! *It* was now able to enjoy by a red glow with a blue halo the brioches, crumpets, and the little French pastries that required butter in abundance. *It* was not only (I thought) that she had become an urban gourmet, but that she had been nourished so richly on the delicacies of the cornbelt. The twenties at least offered physical

sustenance. Prohibition cut sadly into our veterans' growing
knowledge of good wine, but they returned with appetites whetted
by international delicacies which now began to appear on New
York City menus.

Willa's letters had for ten years preserved a continuity
in our friendship. Casual, frank, gay and often more confidential
than meetings, they were indeed precious to me. But unless letters
are closely spaced, as in love letters, for instance, or acute
intellectual exchanges, from mind to mind like the famous
Holmes-Pollock letters, they slide deceptively over human, mental
and philosophic differences which do develop when human beings
are face to face and talk.

Willa did seem to not care for talk as difference; as
argument and ferment. Her mind was rarely open. When she had
made it up, she wanted to prevail. I had been young, and very
much a disciple, a learner and tyro in writing when I first met
her. Now I was at least on my own, and at least must stand my
ground--or be silent.

First, about the War. In the summer and fall of 1920
Willa had been in France with Miss Lewis, (seeing) for herself how
the last reach of her Western pioneer dream had registered in
American graveyards lifting their stark crosses to the soft French
skies. My "war-book", Shadow-Shapes, came out in her absence;
she read it on her return. She cared much less for it, I believe,
see, than for my first book French Perspectives, though she never
quite said so. My best readers were my comrades in a shared
experience, a sort of mystery, an atmosphere, at least hinted at

hero, but not fully communicated to those who had not participated,
who could not register in Melville's now trite phrase, "the shock
of
my discovery".

War was a *story* to Willa. It had been a story from
the moment when she first heard of it in 1914--in the French and
Bohemian country of Nebraska. No soldier she had met on Broadway
had told her the truth of it. He couldn't. He wouldn't. Neither
would, nor could I. [Even her hero, Claude, whose letters home
she perhaps by now possessed, had been writing to a tender Mother;
how was he to tell the truth?]

Serenely

Her intolerance began to trouble me. She was truly
sceptical about the post-war world. Take this Viennese Freud:
why was everybody reading him? Tolstoy knew as much about
psychology—with no isms attached—as any fiction writer needed.
I didn't agree. Freud was here: I had to read him, because I
lived in today's world. But Willa, like the Pueblo Indians who
—I had been told in New Mexico—had no word for future, looked
backward with poignant regret. Our present lay about us in ruins
but we had, she wistfully remarked, a beautiful past.

As I limped along beside her in the Park, I was aware
that my brisk friend had to curb her impatience. She was very
sympathetic that I'd had bad luck—but she did easily shun the
actual perception that an ankle or a leg had been filled full of
steel; A human body should remain intact and as God made it. I
wasn't yet forty; yet here I was with a cane. She did approve
of it; I forced her to a trip to New Mexico in the beginning of this year
1920. Dr. Lovett had insisted that my power to walk would come

back if I stretched my ankles in the stirrup. To quit indus-
trialized urbanity, to explore on horseback <u>Ancient America</u> where
primitive pioneering conditions still prevailed, and the <u>magical</u>
overwhelming drama of Nature still ruled mens' minds and thoughts,
have been <u>willa said</u>, he
must be an immense release from wounds and world problems. <u>Willa said</u>.

But, I retorted, there are also world problems in the
Southwest in micro-cosmic form. Primitive man, in New Mexico,
a state three fifths the size of France, is living in a stratified
society. The few white "Anglos"--on top, the native Mexicans,
on the next layer, and the Indians at the bottom of the heap.
The classes and the masses, as in Europe or in a French or British
Colony. What is the Pueblo Indian's relation to American democracy?

Willa did not ask herself such questions. I told her
I'd tried to find out how the Pueblo felt about the War. There
were only a few Pueblos among the eighteen thousand Indians who
volunteered. The treaty agreements still held; Indians were not
conscripted. But some of them felt guilty.
A man I'd met out there had told me that once on a hunting trip
in the mountains two or three leaders from a large village which
had resisted white education stopped him in his wagon and indicated
that they intended to kill him.

He argued with them. "What's the matter? You know me.
You know I am a friend to the Indian."

"Maybe. But you German, we think?"

"Yes, I have German blood. What of it?"

"But Washington U.S.A. fight the Germans. We not go.
But we say, if we kill _one_ German, everything O.K."

Next summer we would go out and put it in order.

(WHITE SPACE)

Willa and I could not talk of Wilson, nor of the Allies feeding of the Germans. She made grim comments. The social and political values carried over from pre-war to post-war, Wilsonian times were, after all, the social and sociological values of the Theodore Roosevelt era, won in part by McClure's Magazine. She did not esteem them. She saw or divined more clearly than I how (when the peace was signed) finally the Victorian age had retreated into the past--and, beat (an emotional retreat in that direction.) But we could, as ever talk about books.

Main Street appeared in 1920, so did Three Soldiers by the still hardly known Dos Passos. Willa had no use for Main Street or Three Soldiers, precursors of the "novel of protest", and the sociological fiction of the twenties, which she especially abhorred.

What did I think of this Sinclair Lewis? Before I could say a word she hotly asserted that he had been satisfied to get an external view of the small prairie centre. She explained, defensively, that in every town like Gopher Prairie there existed at least one family, probably several, where standards of world culture, music, the arts, the languages were preserved. She had brought in such a family--that of the storekeeper and grain merchant in My Antonia.

But, she said, when Sinclair Lewis looked at his small
town, he found nothing of the sort--only commonness, cheapness,
ignorance. He had the point of view of the drummer who stops
in the businessman's hotel; gossips with the loungers at the
drug counter!

in 1920, Sinclair Lewis, even at the age of thirty, was admired Willa Cather's Nebraska novels. He said, lecturing in Omaha in this year:

"Miss Cather is Nebraska's foremost citizen. The United States knows Nebraska because of Willa Cather's books."

Later, in the days of Miss Cather's and Sinclair Lewis's fame, the two became fast friends. It may well be that Willa came to estimate the whole reach of Lewis's work differently. We never talked of it after "Main Street" appeared, and then she placed "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" as superior in this mode. She had recommended them to me when I first knew her, saying that though one could not call Dreiser an artist, he had the stuff and power of the novelist. Lewis was a herald of a changed world, and so were social, free-verse poets like Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, whom she demolished with a word. (Masters' work, of course, was rather close to the spirit of "The Sculptor's Funeral", and as for free verse, Miss Cather wrote some herself.) At this time the Imagists were active and vocal. She dismissed them severally and en masse.

Amy Lowell, their leader on this side of the ocean, was a friend of mine, as she knew -- a very amusing character who sat up all night and worked and ate at the wrong hours. If one did not admire old Boston, traditional Boston, one might enjoy Amy Lowell. She herself did not. Miss Lowell had regular metres in her very blood-stream -- yet she was a rebel in poetry and it played the tyrant in her public and private life.

Here Willa began to sputter and I was moved to inquire into a story, already apocryphal in literary Boston, about a visit Willa had made a few years earlier with Professor George Edward Woodberry of Columbia University to Amy Lowell's Victorian mansion in Brookline. The distinguished

Later, in the days of Miss Cathar's and Sinclair Lewis's fame, the two became fast friends. It may well be that Willa came to estimate the whole reach of Lewis's work differently. We never talked of it after "Main Street" appeared, and then she placed "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" as superior in this mode. She had recommended them to me when I first knew her, saying that though one could not call Dreiser an artist, he had the stuff and power of the novelist. Lewis was a herald of a changed world, and so were social, free-verse poets like Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, whom she demolished with a word. Masters' work, of course, was rather close to the spirit of "The Sculptor's Funeral", and as for free verse, Miss Cathar wrote some herself. At this time the Imagists were active and vocal. She dismissed them severally and en masse.

elderly English professor and Miss Cather were guests at Mrs. Fields' on Charles Street and it was arranged that Miss Lowell should send her limousine to fetch them.

By the time they reached Sevenels, with its mansard roofs, lawns, shrubberies, and gardens Professor Woodberry had told Miss Cather about the Keats manuscripts, letters and books that Miss Lowell was unable to collect. Mrs. Lowell discovered, she claimed, a good deal that was fresh. He itched to see for himself.

But after they were introduced into the waxed, baronial spaces that one might well expect of a Boston Lowell, a considerable delay set in. Miss Lowell was still dictating -- in bed, of course--to her secretary aloft. Mrs. Ada Russell, her friend and lady-in-waiting, offered them tea and a dozen amenities and explanations. But currents of impatience had set in, and the bulky dynamic Poetess-Imagist rushing upon them, at last, full of casual bonhommie and friendliness, cap-a-pie, in her long plain rich silk, buttoned Quaker-like from collar to toes, perhaps found them a bit stiff: if Amy Lowell wanted the esteem and sought the friendship of a noted scholar, this was hardly the way to behave, Willa thought.

Of course, her opinion was not important to Amy. Willa Sibert Cather was just a Houghton Mifflin author whom the Imagist might get around to reading in due course. Though, she preferred detective stories to novels of the prairie.

Well, they were eventually led, as I recall, fairly fuming

to the Sacred Precinct; the safe where Amy kept her treasures;
or else, perhaps, the Keats' material was unlocked and brought
by the Priestess-Imagist to her library table. In any event,
the Professor, so modest and so learned, eventually extended his
eager right hand.

But the owner stepped forward touchily, seized the "item", set her thumbs and fingers firmly on the two edges like a monk with a Missal and held it herself under the Professor's nose. He must not touch it--nobody might touch her rarities. It was clear that they were so much a part of her person that a violation would occur if the most revered scholar so much as turned a page. She, Amy, would do the turning.

Willa, at this point in her story, stifled with fury, just blew up. Her sentences, always broken emphatic and colloquial but ordered, exploded like fireworks. Woodberry, the great Woodberry, revered of students and scholars was at Sevenels but a slum child with dirty hands!

(WHITE SPACE)

In the winter of 1921-22 I was back again in Tenth Street, after a long stay in Tesuque Valley and in Santa Fe. Willa was warm-hearted about four articles I had written for *Harper's*.

177.

of highbrow talk and critical concurrence.

But when "One of Ours" came out, at last, in October, 1922, it did not seem "unfurnished". Indeed I was troubled by the chorus of critical dismay that arose from the intellectual publications. The evocative style of the earlier Nebraska novels had apparently been scrapped for a lot of pedestrian detail about midwest farm life. Was Miss Cather deserting to the mass audience? "One of Ours" had been serialized in *The Ladies Home Journal*. Even Mencken and Nathan, her most ardent admirers, were in a state of shock and dismay.

"One of Ours" reached me in Tesuque when the aspens had turned to glorious patches of pale gold on the dark-forested flanks of the Sangre de Cristos and my own poplars and cottonwoods were aflame. I was by then embarked on a fiery contemporary and at first local venture: fighting, with the artists and writers of Santa Fe, the Pueblos' battles against Senators Fall and Bursum, who tried to capture their lands; and against Indian Commissioner Burke, who wanted to suppress their rituals. The long crusade had started under John Collier's leadership.

"One of Ours" seemed out of key. Like the critics I missed the evocative glow of passionate young memory. The novel seemed at first to me, grey, middle-aged, cold-hearted, almost querulous about the faults and miseries that a boy with a finer grain than his brothers had had to endure in the contemporaneous Midwest. But before I had read it through I received a hot-foot, high-spirited comment on her critics from Willa, dated, I noticed, from Central Park.

She had been seeing our mutual friends the William Allen

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Whites of Emporia, Kansas, and had been gaily twitted in Biblical terms by Will White: "If thy Mencken and thy Nathan desert thee then the Lord will see thee through." White, who had contributed to *McClure's* and joined the band who bought *The American Magazine* before Willa took on her *McClure's* editorship was an emphatic low-brow. It was important to her, he felt, that Claude, Willa's fellow Nebraskan, should win the big audience.

Compare these extremely moving, *vital pages*; thumb-nail sketches of a gifted musician who had a fundamental disbelief in war and nevertheless became a greater American when he gave himself to it, with the rather pale and insubstantial David Gerhardt of the novel. The latter was recognizable as Hochstein, but not "created", even as a secondary character, in the sense that Claude's quivering mother, tied to a crass, hectoring husband, whose humor ever put Claude in the wrong were created; or, above all, Mahailey, the voiceless, the muted, the wily old family servant who divined so much and knew so little. (For interest in a "recurrence", compare Mahailey with "Poor Marty", a poem that is to be found only in the 1933 edition of "April Twilights".)

It seems that the true creative process with Miss Cather was a slow and inward thing, and that her deepest compassion was aroused by voiceless human beings whom she felt to be at the mercy of life and fate -- like an old poor-white servant, or an old grandmother -- whom we shall meet later -- people who never talked and so never thought, but did feel.

"It wasn't American to explain yourself." (Claude says.) "You didn't have to. On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't: that Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy -- if you tried to say more it was because you liked to hear yourself talk."

Hochstein, of course, did not belong to the voiceless.

The war climax, in which the disappointed farm boy of found his transfiguration, is unconvincing to the war hero/today, the veteran of World War Two, whose typical experience leads him to find himself a helpless unit among millions from other nations. This veteran has expressed his own sense of his tragic fate

in raw books like "The Naked and the Dead" -- a title from which Miss Gather would have cringed before she had even tried to read one page. The title of the A.E.F. section of "One of Ours" is: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On".

In her story there are a few smelly corpses, but no pro-
fanity, no sex, no rebellion, no chaos are even hinted at. Avari-
cious French peasants, whom we used to hear of during the First
World War, as exploiting our doughboys, are absent. Instead, we
meet comprehending French people of the upper and lower bourgoisie.
The sense of order, veracity, and politesse are such that the Army
as an institution is fully upheld, and Claude's fulfilment in an
heroic death suffers no disillusion, till the last pages and
sentences of the book.

This is no doubt why Willa Cather received the Pulitzer
Prize for "One of Ours". Thousands of American parents and many
American veterans, too, saw the rewards of their sacrifices here
displayed gloriously. The intellectual and more humanly or philo-
sophically conscious, veteran found the novel somewhat "off the
beam". Willa

Miss Gather was visiting her friends the Hambourgs at their villa in Ville d'Avray, outside Paris, when a reporter found her and delivered the news of the Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1923.

The report said that her surprise was great: she had
had nothing of the sort in mind; had written to please herself;
had no expectations for the book.

Whatever prizes or degrees came to Willa Gather were
nothing she aimed for; she was too stalwart, self-directed and
honest for that. But she liked the prize and never ceased to
say, in print and out of print, that

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Claude was her favorite of all her heroes, she often said. Was it because he closely resembled a first cousin of her own, whose letters to his mother she had read? Because he was almost a piece of herself, left behind in Red Cloud? Claude is the only young hero she had, except Paul and Tom Outland, and all three died young. There are a number of other young men in the novels who serve as reflectors for her heroines, to be sure. Her older heroes, like Bartley Alexander and Professor St. Peter, subtle and complex characters, strike far deeper into her mature estimates of life. For she had, of course, realized that it is in middle life that the complex man cannot evade his psychological fate.

(WHITE SPACE)

In 1922, Knopf brought out "April Twilights and Other Poems", a new edition of her first book, *Poems Insert Below*. Some of the early poems, which had made the author blush in 1911 -- and, as she said to me then, had led her to buy up and secrete the copies, were suppressed. Others, published in magazines in the *McClure's* period and later, were added.

Willa's poetry, if not taken just affectionately or autobiographically, as a youthful notebook on life [-- if taken critically, it has echoes of Housman, of William Butler Yeats, and other masters. I regretted that she reissued the early book, at just the point when she had become a master of original prose. For her poetry could not rank with that of modern American poets she admired, like Robert Frost. Nevertheless, a good case could be made for the reissue of "April Twilights", if only because Willa herself had the poet's response to life, including the typical sense of the lyric poet that youth and the emotions]

189.

of youth, because of their great intensity and simplicity, surpass all other emotions. Dorothy Canfield Fisher has spoken effectively to this point, and suggested how unusual this mood and belief is in a novelist, who commonly values more than young emotion the wisdom and insights accumulated during middle and elder years.

But Willa's very first literary expression was in poetry; in verse she was able to write love lyrics, to give vivid pictures of foreign lands and places -- as for instance, London, Ludlow Castle, Delphi, The Palatine, Provence; and the moods, elegiac or lyrical, evoked by them. Ferris Greenslet, in *Under the Bridge*, speaks of

"how Miss Cather's sense of beauty, which first found its expression in poetry, persisted and colored all her work. One wonders whether she, like those other poet novelists, Hardy and Meredith, might in the age of Elizabeth or the Revolution, have been poets only."

This is a challenging idea. Yet her ear seems very much less acute in poetry. *Going Home* and my favorite *Prairie Spring* and *Prairie Dawn*, *Macon Prairie* and *A Silver Cup*, are her poems in free verse. More characteristic of her poetry as a whole are the regular and sometimes sentimental rhymes and metres of *The Swedish Mother*, and *Spanish Johnny*, who turns up as a character also in "The Song of the Lark".

In May, 1923, when *The Century Magazine* began the serialization of *A Lost Lady* (in three numbers) the contributor's column announced:

"Miss Cather belongs to no school and regularly disappoints those who expect that a new book will be like any other."

When, in September 1923, Knopf published the novel it was instantly appraised as Willa Cather's "best", her "greatest" story. Be that as it may, Marian Forrester had the attributes that make a woman seductive to men, including literary critics. She became the toast of New York; in a trice one of the memorable heroines of American fiction. People talked of her eyes, "dark and full of light, set under a low white forehead and arching eyebrows..." lively laughing intimate nearly always a little mocking"; of her "inviting musical laugh that was like the distant measures of dance music, heard through opening and shutting doors."

Those who felt that Miss Cather had fumbled in the longours of *One of Ours* were thoroughly reassured. Here, indeed, was the novel *demeuble*; short pointed condensed episodic symbolic. It covered many years of time in the heroine's life. But the author had shown such consummate skill in elimination and abbreviation that one closed the volume with a sigh for its brevity.

The novel is *quintessentially* a portrait of a gay but (encore)an old-timeyjeune—perhaps early thirties?) baffling lady of the frontier of the old West, the still young/wife of a railroad contractor, whose home outside the small prairie town of Sweetwater was a renowned centre of hospitality to the railroad magnates who travelled on the Burlington.

192.

187.

The setting brings the story into the succession of the Nebraska novels. The period pictured in "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia" seems earlier. Yet the foreign homesteaders of those books had come West on the railroad and Captain Forrester, now elderly and retired, had been a still earlier pioneer. His prototype, Governor Garber, according to Mrs. Bennett, travelled up the Republican River in 1870 on horseback, staked his claim in the midst of deer and buffalo.

Willa Cather, working imaginatively, does not make calendared deductions and implications for us. She simply sets us down at the Forresters and we find ourselves in a period piece -- the late eighties, perhaps? -- when good was good and evil evil. Though written in the beginning of the Freudian age and by an author who now could present a cool cheek to a heroine -- make her irresistible and yet not be herself over-dazzled -- it had no modern Freudian implications. Willa had an infallible instinct for presenting a period in its own terms. She had only, she said, to return to the cottonwood grove where she picknicked as a child to find Mrs. Forrester. She had only -- I am saying this -- to recall the technique and the moral outlook of her favorite French masters of the novel to portray her: a heroine who does not preserve the moralities, but clings to the amenities, and sometimes surprises us with the nobilities.

Mrs. Forrester was the most Jamesian of Miss Cather's heroines (even though she would greet a distinguished guest in negligee, brushing her long black hair). The lost lady lived in another and more uplifted world than

that of Sweetwater--approached by a bridge that sometimes
washed out. James Thurber, one of The New Yorker wits, a few
years ago went to Sweetwater in search of Mrs. Forrester and
also came upon Madame de Vionnet, the lost lady of Henry James's
"The Ambassador." In an incomparable melange of charm and irony, Thurber made in Jamesian vein a little pointed, nostalgic fun,
of the serious-minded, mid-Victorian way both writers took their
naughty heroines.

But that rapt contemplation of a remembered past which
had its own moral code and its winter pleasures in Denver makes
the novel a document as well as a chef d'oeuvre. Willa was more
ready than was customary with her to let the newspapers in on the
secrets of her new heroine. She told a newspaper columnist that
Mrs. Forrester had been created out of an emotion that reacts
on a true artist like food on a hungry person. She had been
"teased" (Sarah Orne Jewett's word again) for years!

"A Lost Lady was a beautiful ghost in my mind
for twenty years before it came together as a possible
subject for presentation. All the lovely emotions
that one has had, some day appear with bodies and it
isn't as if one found ideas suddenly. Before this,
the memories of these experiences and emotions have
been like a PERFUME perfume."

"To me, the one important thing is never to kill
the figure that you care for, for the sake of atmosphere,
well-balanced structure, or neat presentation.
Sometimes too much symmetry kills things."

Mrs. Forrester's perfume, her aura, her place as an
**objet d'art** in the middle of her story were the guide to technique.
Yet though the writing went quickly, four months is the legend--
Willa told me that she had to try the novel in three different
forms before she hit her mark. One of the drafts was straight,
first-person narration by Niel Herbert, the idealistic local boy

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picnic
who fell out of the tree in the picnict grove when trying to
reach and kill a bird that Ivy Peters (the villain of the story)
had blinded in casual cruelty. This sharp sadistic stroke of
Ivy's prepared the reader--as does Mrs. Forrester's eager care
for the boy Niel in her own walnut bed--for the complex develop-
ments of the future. Ivy would be later the crass exploiter of
a fair wayward victim, Niel would be her defender and protector,
even when disenchanted.

The first person narrative was read by John Galsworthy,
who advised Willa (I am indebted to Ferris Greenslet for this bit
of information) that it was a serious hazard, in his opinion,
for a woman author to limit the observation of a complex subtle
heroine to the mind of a very young man. Miss Jewett had said
much the same thing in a letter about that early story "On the
Gull's Road". Yet one of Cathar's finest books, "My Antonia,
had just used this favorite device of hers with final success;
She did not entirely abandon it in A Lost Lady. Though the third
person is largely employed Niel remains the mirror in which Mrs.
Forrester's glide to perdition is most luminously reflected.

I don't remember whether Willa gave me her
lost lady's real name, Mrs. Garber. The portrait was, in Red
Cloud, recognized as based on the wife of an ex-governor of
Nebraska, who had been one of the founders of the original Red
Cloud community and had married a beauty from California.

We have learned, recently, that the Forrester-Garber
house still stands. It has been described by Mrs. Bennett, in

190.

"The World of Willa Cather", and has even been photographed by Life. I know one Nebraska-born pilgrim who found the yellow roses, and entered the deserted mansion of the past, realizing what it meant to a dauntless young girl like Willa Cather, in search of sophistication, to drive out with Mrs. Garber's gay guests from Denver, or to happen into the Red Cloud milliner's shop and find the Lost Lady (who bought her hats in Denver) on a stool, twirling about in her ruffled starched skirts, balancing on a toe in a pointed slipper.

With this heroine Willa brought what are usually called her Nebraska novels to a charmed end -- for a decade.

In 1923, the year of publication of "A Lost Lady", the state of Nebraska became conscious that it had produced a very important writer, and the women of Omaha -- the Omaha Society of Fine Arts -- raised the money for a portrait to be hung in the Omaha Public Library. Willa Cather chose Leon Bakst, the scene and costume designer of the Russian ballet, to paint her portrait. She met him in Paris, and he painted her there in his studio in the summer of 1923. The portrait was unveiled in Nebraska by her niece, then Mary Virginia Auld, at the end of the year. It hangs beside that of John J. Neihardt, "poet laureate of Nebraska".

"To let young people know that recognition is given to art as well as to more material enterprises."

PART THREE
1924 - 1947
Persecution on three Decacon.

CHAPTER I
A NEW DIMENSION
1924-1926

After the publication of _A Lost Lady_, in 1923, Willa Cather seemed to draw a long breath of satisfaction and reflection. Then moved quietly forward to take her rightful place in American Literature. As the novels of the later twenties emerged, in quick succession; _The Professor's House_, 1925, _My Mortal Enemy_, 1926, _Death Comes for the Archbishop_, 1927, and then, in 1931, _Shadows on the Rock_, it was clear, even at the time, that a "new tide" had washed over Willa Cather and left its mark upon her. These works of her fifties have quite another form, dimension, and vibration than her Nebraska books. Their significance is religious; they seek the decisions of the world and the spirit on man's tragic fate.

"Manners" figure in them, yet they are lifted to a
level beyond manners. The agonising problem of mortality, the
oncoming of death, is always present, and we are led to feel
that unusual individuals, like Professor St. Peter and Myra Hen-
shawe ("My Mortal Enemy") must wrestle with them alone and
single-handed -- as, indeed, they must wrestle with the inev-
itable march of the twentieth century, which is felt as a
menace to their moral poise and well-being.

But Miss Cather's own pace is notably leisurely, and
as usual her power of concentration (but not her
her gift of elimination) is so brilliant that the reader is ever
beguiled, never pressed nor jostled, by the passage of time, even
in a novel like "My Mortal Enemy", démeublé to a high degree.

THE BEWILDERED TRAVELER

Miss Cather gave no public impression of uncertainty, as the twenties went their hilarious way. Her face had more strength and frank resolution than ever before. Still, at heart, she was deeply aware of post-war life and literary currents, bewildering and new; and did not conceal to her friends her round aversion for the strong, disillusioned young talents that rushed along the literary seas, as if they alone possessed the rights of navigation. I saw her as a fine little French corvette, designed on gracious, firm lines, threading her way through the turbulent [yet floating] waters of the Jazz Age. Though abstractly--and concretely, too--Miss Cather believed in youth, its creativeness and its fecundity, in her fifties, as she then was, the young hopefuls of her own profession were the "sports". They kept their eyes fixed on the restive present and the unpredictable future, with its confused, pressing

202A

She had said--so in her Breadloaf lectures, and I
owe to Mrs. Bennett's "The World of Willa Cather", a quotation
from the New York World on the subject:

"The six years I spent on 'McClure's Magazine in an editorial capacity, I call work. It was during the six years... that I came to have a definite idea about writing. In reading manuscripts submitted to me, I found that 95 percent of them were written for the sake of the writer -- never for the sake of the material. The writer wanted to express his clever ideas, his wit, his observations.

"Almost never did I find a manuscript that was written because a writer loved his subject so much he had to write about it."

"Usually when I did get such a manuscript it was so crude it was ineffective. Then I realized that one must have two things -- strong enough to mate together without either killing the other -- else one had better change his job. I learned that a man must have a technique and a birthright to write -- I do not know how else to express it. He must know his subject with an understanding that passes understanding -- as the babe knows its own mother's breast."

In an essay on Miss Cather in his "A Bookman's Day-book" Mr. Rascoe remarked that Miss Cather looked as if she might conduct a law practice, a dairy farm, or a magazine with equal efficiency. Nevertheless, he saw in her, in his magazine piece, "a woman intelligently aware of her own genius, who had the will to bring it to fruition", and further

197

by the singers and actresses who figure in her stories: she
finds the stage and the opera "an escape into an amazing world
where drabness and time-serving are forgotten in the illusion
of adventure."

Robert Frost once said to me that the word "escape"
is ambiguous; is one escaping from something or to something?
It seems to me that Willa, if possible, and certainly quite
without shame or repentance, escaped both from and to. The
ballet, for instance, interested her vitally as a balanced trial
of grace, poise, muscle and temperament in which a unique indi-
vidual, the ballerina, could excell. The game of tennis fascin-
ated her for the same reasons: she compared Suzanne Lenglen,
the superb tennis star of the twenties, to Pavlovka, the Russian
dancer, a superlative mistress of coordination and aesthetic
charm.

When I went to (WHITE SPACE)

When I went to Bank Street, and found, lying about,
the English editions of Willa's works, and the numerous paper-
bound translations into Czech, into the Scandinavian languages,
into French, Italian, Dutch, I knew, from Willa's delight in
them, that

206.

She had done her full stint of book-reviewing in her Nebraskan college days and her Pittsburgh years.

But she was free as air in expressing her private views of contemporaneous novelists, and spoke of them in very much the same tone as does Brooks in "The Confident Years":

"The burden of the new generation of novelists was a sort of preordained despair, a note of defeat or failure, regression or decay that seemed to express the bewilderment of depolarized spirits, and among their characters morons abounded, with gangsters and mindless and primitige men, and with duped and put-upon children of all ages. While all these types existed in life, the novelists seemed to look for them because they were the opposite of the heroes of romantic fiction -- superior beings with developed minds and wills -- and because they were too rudimental, too undeveloped to exercise conscious choices on the moral plane. They invariably submitted, without question or protest, to fate. These writers, in their predominant feeling of chaos, had apparently lost sight of the spiritual poles."

Willa never lost her own sense of the spiritual poles, or allowed her major characters to do so. In her dark moments she felt, like the bright young men, that she lived like a bewildered traveller in a garish, unrestful hotel -- to use the words of Conrad in "Victory" -- but Willa preferred to wear a calm exterior. Once in a while, if I met her for a walk, she would be jubilant over a new discovery in a familiar author's repertory:

"Have you ever read 'Sea and Sardinia'? D.H.L.
there used the language of cubisme."

"I'm sending you 'The Woman Who Rode Away' -- you'll find be startle d!"

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one of
our mutual friend stretched before you on a couch!"

Why was someone who sanctioned the modern in painting
so removed from the avant-garde of literary America at this
period? The young man of _The Seven Arts_; _The Dial_ under Scho-
field Thayer, even with the discerning Alyse Gregory at the
helm, and then the unique Miss Marianne Moore, ignored her
altogether. Willa Cather was not, as the French say, _dans le
mouvement_; the movement that had pretty well scrapped the
Victorian age, which Cather still idealised. The avant-garde
were thus as blind to her qualities as she to theirs, though
she, too cared for Proust and saw _Ulysses_ as a landmark.

(WHITE SPACE)

The Canbys, in the early twenties, lived not far from
Willa in Greenwich Village. She had never been involved with
the vagaries of the Village, in the pre-war days, and still
less with the goings-on of the prohibition era. Sedate, dis-
tinguished literary neighbors like Elinor Wylie and the Henry
Canbys were pleasing. Mrs. Canby tells how, in her innocence,
before she had ever met Miss Cather, she once made her way to
Bank Street, Number Five, in the sacred hours of morning,
though probably near noon, and rang the bell in the vestibule:
with the purpose of inviting the author of _A Lost Lady_ to dinner.

After considerable delay, the buzzer buzzed; Marian Canby,
walking into the dark lower hall of the small apartment house,
and, looking skyward, saw no angel but a very dark, dour face,

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When we were alone, we usually ended by talking of writing -- her writing. [ Her major theme -- the theme the Greeks loved -- the struggle of a superior being with an adverse environment, still obsessed her. ] She said, still, that her novels were transcriptions of love for people and places. But now form seemed all important. [ Her aim was to create a work of art, out of subject matter, new or old, that had "teased" her, and had left, as she said, a deep impression. ] Mind and invention were not her tools; the decisive element was intuitive, poetical, almost mystical, *lightning-like* perception. Though she rejected Freud, she was a reader of Henry Bergson. She had spoken, in the 1922 preface to the new edition of "Alexander's Bridge" of how she had been enlightened about form "in flashes that are as unreasoning, often unreasonable, as life itself."

Ever since "One of Ours" she had spoken of her belief that the writing should be so lost in the object that it doesn't exist for the reader. Self-consciousness was a mistake -- the writer should be just an eye and an ear. Proust was better when he wrote that way. At this time she thought of prose as allied to the other arts: the ear, especially, must be attuned to the cadences of music and poetry. Her new book, she told me (I doubt if she gave its title then -- "The Professor's House", it was) was based on a musical form.

211. 205

Indeed, she said her unfinished opus had a sonata form, starting _molto moderato_. There were to be three parts, every one with Italian musical nomenclature. These last did not appear in the book, and I cannot quote them accurately, but my impression is that the middle book, Tom Outland's story, was to be _molto appasionata_, as indeed it proved to be in the reading. The cliff-dweller part was based, she said, on a true story that Willa had heard on the Navajo Reservation from a famous family of Indian traders, the Wetherells.

The deep theme of her book, she implied, was the connection or opposition between youth and age, and the way they mutually stirred one another. She talked a little about the difference between the self-reliant, self-directed, rather impersonal Western boy with his simplicity, poise and disregard for material advantage and the Eastern boy, pushed by the competitive urban civilization to complex, sophisticated, egocentric, materialistic attitudes. Somehow I felt that the young hero so close to her heart might resemble those favorite brothers of hers, Douglass and Roscoe, with whom she seemed to be always dashing around the West and Southwest. Anyhow, her rapturous references to Tom made me look up an old _McClure's_ article I had kept, in which she commented in a striking fashion on the fecundity of youth:

"The individual possesses this power for only a little while. He is sent into the world charged with it, but he can't keep it a day beyond his allotted time. He has his hour when he can do, live, become. If he devoted these years to caring for an aged parent -- God may punish him but Nature will not forgive him."

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grew a dark spruce wood lighted by early sunshine.

"On either side of the trail yellow toadstools
and white mushrooms lifted the heavy thatch of
brown spruce needles and made little damp tents."

Even the giant grandfather spruce, gone grey and lying prone,
was an old friend which had not suffered change in his absence.
Sea-driven, haunted by gulls, with its herring weirs and its
springing waterfalls, and its high, grassy headlands, the Grand
Manan offered balm and well-being.

(WHITE SPACE)

Since I did not know New Brunswick and both of us,
following our separate ways, did a good deal of coming and going
from the Southwest, Santa Fe and Taos would turn up more often
in our regional conversation. One summer Willa and Miss Lewis
had had for a time the little house of Mabel Luhan's occupied
by D.H. Lawrence before he acquired from Mabel the high ranch
in the mountains -- the ranch he paid for with the manuscript
of "Sons and Lovers". It was much later, in the thirties, that
I had the same house, where two major novelists had sojourned
and Lawrence had painted a phoenix, his favorite emblem, on a wall.

At this time I spent an occasional week in Mabel's
Guest House or in her fascinating Big House, set in sagebrush
and hollyhocks, with parrots swinging in the doors, and sage
drying on the hearths, and the Indian fields -- edged by those
golden sunflowers that Willa had written always follow the roads
to freedom -- stretching on to the many-terraced buildings of
the pueblo, under the

215. 209

We try, we can't put on. So we lie down, we go to sleep. Then
I have dream, tell me how to fix wheel. So we do."

Mabel's intuitive eyes would sparkle with pleasure
when Tony measured up to the scientists. Short, plump, vital,
restless and searching, yet ever unseriously smiling with her
and longer over her ears, like a Pueblo woman's, she was
bobbed hair out in a bang on her forehead, and pushing all her
New York friends to join the Indian "movement": to help defeat
the politicians who were trying to destroy the Pueblo lands and
ceremonies. But she made no headway with Willa Cather, who car-
ried her dislike for "joining" to a point so extreme that she
would not even join the Authors' League, her own professional group.

Willa -- so I believe -- enjoyed a ruined prehistoric plaza,
empty of living folk, far better than the contemporaneous plaza
where a Deer Ceremony or a Corn Dance or an Eagle Dance was in
process. The tribal side of the Indian meant little to her --
even though Mabel insisted that one could not know the Pueblo
Indian -- no, not even Antonio Luhan -- until one knew him trib-
ally.

John Collier and Willa Cather met in Taos in 1926, at the
house of these mutual friends Mabel and Antonio Luhan. Neither
made the least connection with the other -- so both told me, drily.

Mr. Collier's dedicated, dogged personality, his al-
most mystical insight into the Indian's life and human rights,
was a bring about which actually were to lead to far greater cohesion between the
aloof Indian and the American democracy, seemed to Miss Cather
fanatical. She had had an overdose of fanatics at McClure's,
and now that she was so immersed in the art of writing and had
given her own conception of the Indian in her own book, she
wanted no news about him from outside -- so I surmised.

In the nineteen forties, I gave Willa a little story
that had delighted me, about the experience of two white

221.

Many times that evening did I regret having committed
myself to trying to capture in words the uncapturable essence of
the two unique writers, two first rate specimens, who preferred
the shade to the sun, who did not at all fit into the collective
American literary pattern or care to do so; yet had already so
deeply affected the American professors and their students, the
critics, the elite among readers.

They had certain things in common, I felt -- there were
likenesses in their differences. Frost had never thrown off the
effect of having been born in San Francisco in a rough-and-tumble
age. Nor Willa the starkness of her migration at the age of nine
from a soft green valley to wild red earth. To both, the hardness
of the basic struggle for existence was a long memory that puri-
fied their approach to the life of the artist. The usual trappings
and self-indulgences seemed to them both effete. Both thought
of themselves, if I were to believe them, as "roughnecks" who had
more or less happened into fame. Both liked a rather bare and
timeless world. Both were suspicious of their own emotional,
singing side, and imposed on it an elegant and sober line.

Frost had told me how uncertain he was, how floundering
in direction as a youth. All he knew was that he "cared to write
a little poem" -- and to marry Elinor. Willa, far more confident,
unencumbered and self-impelled, had early decided to be a writer.
But, like Frost, she had turned from one thing to another to make
her way -- to journalism, teaching, to editorial work. Both of
them had come into their first significant recognition in their

222.

late thirties. Yet in the life and work of both one could discern
an absolute sureness and continuity of literary development.

"Frost," I said in my portrait, "had stuck with piety
to the clarification of his own tone of voice, his own form and
matter." With Willa it was the same: every novel must be a meet-
ing between the life-line and the line of personal development,
must be a personal discovery. And they had in common their pas-
sionate dependence on the world of nature. They were rocks, they
were trees. In common, too, they held valiantly, like a banner,
their debt to the masters of the past.

"First heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgil-
ian Eclogue and Hamlet," Frost wrote in my copy of *Selected Poems*.
"Influenced by what I have supposed Piers Plowman to be. Never
read it."

The last quip points up a divergence. Willa could be
caustic at her own expense, sometimes savagely angry. But she
did not make light of herself. Where R.F., with his glinting
humor, wandered along, speculating about what the answer was,
Willa seemed to move by will-power and was more apt to think
she knew.

But neither of them ever disappointed me, said I to my-
self, as I took my coat from the little old, sad French garçon,
in the lobby of the Brevoort.

Frost, with someone tugging at his overcoat, hatless,
wild-looking, done forever and aye with pretty speeches, was
frantically herding his family out, out into the dark night.
Willa, on the contrary, stood with stiffly regimented air, wait-

223.

ing for her furs, and bearing coldly with some bold critic who
had tagged after her.

She never had the least little bit of small-talk, not an
iota of ease or light friendliness with a stranger who seemed in-
trusive. What I thought I heard Willa say, on this occasion, to
the gentleman she did not at all encourage to see her to her taxi,
was that the Brevoort cuisine was not what it had been: all the
best French chefs had been called to the colors in 1914, and had
never returned.

226.

In this connection, Mildred Bennett's book offers confirmation of Willa Cather's own earth passion. Quoting from an interview given by her to the *Omaha World Herald*:

"Whenever I crossed the Missouri River coming in to Nebraska the very smell of the soil tore me to pieces. I could not decide which was the real and which the fake me. I almost decided to settle down on a quarter section of land and let my writing go. My deepest affection was not for the other people and other places I had been writing about. I loved the country where I had been a kid, where they still called me Willie Cather.

"When" (Mrs. Bennett says) "she came back to Webster County, Willa liked to go out into the country, climb a hill and let the wind blow in her face. She resented any talking while she was remembering the sensations of the land -- the odors to which she was particularly sensitive."

"I knew every farm, every tree, every field in the region around my home and they all called out to me. My deepest feelings were rooted in this country because one's strongest emotions and one's most vivid mental pictures are acquired before one is fifteen."

(WHITE SPACE)

226.

In this connection, Mildred Bennett's book offers confirmation of Willa Cather's own earth passion. Quoting from an interview given by her to the Omaha World Herald:

"When" (Mrs. Bennett says) "she came back to Webster County, Willa liked to go out into the country, climb a hill and let the wind blow in her face. She resented any talking while she was remembering the sensations of the land — the odors to which she was particularly sensitive."

(WHITE SPACE)

Mildred Bennett's book offers confirmation of Willa's own earth passion. Quoting from an interview given by her to the *Omaha World Herald*:

> "Whenever I crossed the Missouri River coming in to Nebraska the very smell of the soil tore me to pieces. I could not decide which was the real and which the fake me. I almost decided to settle down on a quarter section of land and let my writing go. My deepest affection was not for the other people and other places I had been writing about. I loved the country where I had been a kid, where they still called me Willie Cather.

> "When" (Mrs. Bennett says) "she came back to Webster County, Willa liked to go out into the country, climb a hill and let the wind blow in her face. She resented any talking while she was remembering the sensations of the land -- the odors to which she was particularly sensitive."

> "I knew every farm, every tree, every field in the region around my home and they all called out to me. My deepest feelings were rooted in this country because one's strongest emotions and one's most vivid mental pictures are acquired before one is fifteen."

In *Rhythm in the Modern-Novel*, E.K. Brown, with his rare insight and knowledge, has explained the symbolism of this baffling and fascinating book/in terms of houses: the old house, the new house, and the cliff, the rock house of the Ancients, the ancestors, the house of death -- only this house was right for St. Peter or for Tom Outland.

The Professor's House seems to me, more than any other novel of Willa's, a rainbow bridge to an unknown shore, an inspired spur to the individual reader's intuition of life and death and humankind. When she says herself that/she has bombarded the sonata form, the *nouvelle* in the *roman*, and the Dutch interior

212.

its simpler form of cave dwellings, represent to the Pueblos of
today, as truly as the fallen cities of Greece or Sicily to their
modern heirs, the ancestral heart of a living civilization."

(single
space)
set in)

"Indeed it amuses me to think, as I sit in the "dry and
spotted place" -- so, in the Tewa tongue, the Indians have named
Tesuque -- that within thirty miles of me lie, spread out in the
sun and wind and silence, tenanted only by butterflies and dazzling
lizards and circling bats, citadels that teemed in pre-Columbian
days. Puye, Otowi, Tsankawi, Navakwi, Tcherege. Sky-pitched sites
that Delphi cannot rival. On the Pajarito even the ant hills are
heaped into pyramids, formed out of quartz crystals, matrix of
gold. And under hard-burned earth, below the empty cave houses,
gleaming white and topaz pink, are hidden uncounted jars and bowls
of antique shape, ornamented in black and red, like the jars of
Crete. Here are key patterns, hatched or swallow-tail triangles,
diamonds, zigzags, dots, parallelograms, arranged in bands; here
are awanyus, those curious hand signs or serpent signs, set in whirl-
ing figures; here are sun symbols, life symbols, including tortoises
and dragon flies, not to mention the enormous array of prehistoric
birds, stylicized into three straight tail feathers and a delicate
button-hook of a head. Stone idols, hidden in little niches,
animal fetishes with turquoise eyes, dark with the blood of the
victim, plumed serpents, coiled in adobe circles on the rock;
pecked and painted pictographs of hunts, where mountain goats
leap high before the spear; stone pumas carved life-size in a
shrine: these are some of the treasures of the Pajarito."

213.

"One thing more. Here, deep in the burial places, are mummies. Mummies of men and women with their hands tied to their thighs with ropes of hair, yucca sandals on their feet, with painted jars and shell beads packed about them. Further west and north, below the ruins of the cliff people, have been found the entombed mummies of a still earlier folk, who have coiled baskets of fine weave inverted over their heads and behind their backs. In the graves of these Basket-Makers are new-born babies, strapped to their woven cradles, with their bast diapers and umbilical pads, all complete. Sometimes there are even curly-haired dogs lying with their masters."

"Beside the dead of the Ancient People, through all this shining desert, one finds an invariable offering. Just as the Pueblo storehouses shelter, in their piled cells, one parti-colored crop; the earth-beaten plazas one timeless ceremonial; the wrinkled hands of old men one supernal commodity; so do the Pueblo graves hold the Seed of Seeds. The Divine Maize, as the Aztecs called it. No ornaments of gold attend the antique farmer to eternity. But search among his bones and you will always find one pointed symbol of fertility, that lies pregnant still in the wine-stained dust, below the stone-ribbed mountains: an ear of shriveled corn."

(WHITE SPACE)

212.

(single
space)
set in

"Indeed it amuses me to think, as I sit in the "dry and spotted place" -- so, in the Tewa tongue, the Indians have named Tesuque -- that within thirty miles of me lie, spread out in the sun and wind and silence, tenanted only by butterflies and dazzling lizards and circling bats, citadels that teemed in pre-Columbian days. Puyé, Otowi, Tsankawi, Navakwi, Tcherege. Sky-pitched sites that Delphi cannot rival. On the Pajarito even the ant hills are heaped into pyramids, formed out of quartz crystals, matrix of gold. And under hard-burned earth, below the empty cave houses, gleaming white and topaz pink, are hidden uncounted jars and bowls of antique shape, ornamented in black and red, like the jars of Crete. Here are key patterns, hatched or swallow-tail triangles, diamonds, zigzags, dots, parallelograms, arranged in bands; here are awanyus, those curious hand signs or serpent signs, set in whirl-ing figures; here are sun symbols, life symbols, including tortoises and dragon flies, not to mention the enormous array of prehistoric birds, stylicized into three straight tail feathers and a delicate button-hook of a head. Stone idols, hidden in little niches, animal fetishes with turquoise eyes, dark with the blood of the victim, plumed serpents, coiled in adobe circles on the rock; pecked and painted pictographs of hunts, where mountain goats leap high before the spear; stone pumas carved life-size in a shrine: these are some of the treasures of the Pajarito."

213.

(single
space)
set in)

(WHITE SPACE)

SUPREME COURT
OF THE UNITED STATES

WASHINGTON, D. C.

March 24, 1931

My dear Miss Cather:

A month ago Mr. Greenslet sent me a copy
of "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and suggested
that I might write a line to you. Circumstances
have delayed my reading but I heard the last
words from my secretary last night and avail
myself of Mr. Greenslet's suggestion to tell
you the pleasure I have had. I think you have
the gift of the transfiguring touch. What to
another would be prose, under your hand becomes
poetry without ceasing to be truth. Among the
changes of old age one is that novels are apt
to bore me, and I owe you a debt for two
exceptions, both of which gave me delight.

(WHITE SPACE)

307.

chosen to lie forever in a place where the works of man -- village,
church, graveyard, outlying farms -- are related harmoniously and in-
timately to the universe around them. What she loved in the ancient
cliff cities of New Mexico and Arizona was the sense that there man
and nature and earth were one. Jaffrey, too, surrounded by out-
lying farms and topped by an impressive, ancient church, is, like
Acoma pueblo, a kind of hilly citadel.

The inhabitants of Jaffrey Centre today are relatively
few. For when the Boston and Maine Railroad came through and the
mills were built along the river, most of the citizens moved to East
Jaffrey. That is, of course, why "summer people" bought some of
the old houses at the Centre and why the Old Meeting House has now
become a community centre where atomic scientists and others dis-
cuss the agitations and hopes of the modern world.

Did Willa know how many of these Jaffrey New Englanders
are Roman Catholics? Some have French Canadian names. Even the
Shattuck Inn, where she wrote some of her finest pages, is soon to
house a school of the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary,
for Catholic boys destined for the priesthood; and on the village
street, in Jaffrey Centre, the Sisters of Notre Dame are teaching
New Hampshire boys and girls.

If on her grave that bears no religious emblem or refer-
ences, a young priest laid a wreath for Father Latour and Father
that
Vaillant, I am sure/Willa Cathér would rejoice. If a young veteran
of the Korean war, which she missed by dying in 1947, stopped by--
a man with an Asian outlook, one of those constrained to hail and
accept (as Thornton Wilder said in his Baccalaureate address to
Harvard students in 1952) "that painfully emerging unity of those

308.

who live on the one inhabited star" -- she would surely receive
him as a new Tom Outland.

Miss Cathér did not, however, write only for youth and
age; only for Episcopalians or Roman Catholics; only for Nebraskans,
New Englanders or Virginians. Perhaps she wrote chiefly for
classicists. "The Poet's Testament", found among George Santayana's
papers after his death is the poem I would choose to read at her
grave:

"To trembling harmonies of field and cloud,
Of flesh and spirit was my worship vowed."