WHALE COVE
GRAND MANAN
NEW BRUNSWICK
CANADA

August 16th

Dear Mr. Phelps;

I am everlastingly grateful to you for calling my attention to my astronomical blunder. I knew that in the summer of 1893, sitting on a board sidewalk in a little Nebraska town, I did see the planet Venus go behind the moon and reappear. The neighbors said it was a 'transit' of Venus. When I wrote the story last year, I could easily have checked up on this point, but I knew I had seen the planet behave in such a manner, and it did not occur to me that I had better make sure that I was giving the correct name to its behaviour.

Since your letter was forwarded to me I have had the matter looked up by the Knopf office, and we find that there was an occultation of Venus in the summer of 1893. The correction has been made in the second printing; your kindly letter will probably save me from writing many letters to indignant scientists, and has saved me from making the same blunder in the English edition; we cabled Cassells at once to make the change.

M.S.C.

February 17, 1936.

My dear Mr. Phelps:

I got home from Europe just before Christmas and
have not yet got through the mountain of letters which
accumulated in my long absence, but I want to skip a few
hundred unanswered letters and drop a line to you, because
last night I picked up the Yale Review and read your article
on Mark Twain.

I knew Mark Twain during my first year in New York,
when he was living on lower Fifth Avenue and spent most of
his time in bed. Because I knew the man himself, Mr. Brooks'
book has always seemed to me one of the most glaring pieces
of misapprehension that ever happened in a world full of
mistakes. Mr. Brooks simply has no idea of what the real
man was like; and I am afraid the imaginary Mark Twain,
Mr. Brooks creates, would never have written "Huckleberry
Finn". I don't know Mr. Brooks personally, but I have
always heard good things about his scholarship and integrity.
When he wrote about Mark Twain, he simply made a bad choice
of subject, and I suspect from the general tone of his book
that he could never have understood old Mr. Clemens at all:
and if he had chanced to know him, I am afraid the intercourse
would have been a series of mild, but painful, shocks!

This letter, you will understand, is confidential.
It is not for me to contradict Mr. Brooks. But it is a
great relief to me that some one has boldly refused to swallow
this sentimental view of Mr. Clemens as a blighted genius, and
you were certainly the man to do it. You could do it in the
course of your usual activities; while I would have had to
step so far out of mine, that it would have looked almost as
if I had some personal grudge, ☞ I really feel very grateful
to you. If Mr. Brooks could have seen that old lion in his
bed telling stories to three or four young people, if he could
have seen this for five minutes, he could never have written
his book.

Keep this for me carefully. I am delighted with it.

Governor Wilbur L. Cross's discerning and warmly favorable review, to which Miss Cather's letter below was an acknowledgment, appeared in the *Saturday Review of Literature*, August 22, 1931, p. 67-68. Miss Cather's letter was reprinted in *The Saturday Review* October 17, 1931, p. 216.

"Shadows on the Rock"
A Letter by Willa Cather

"It is seldom that, close to the time of writing, a writer of distinction sets down the purpose and inner nature of a book which has been carefully, skilfully, and successfully written. Willa Cather is not one who attempts to explain her work to the dull or defend it against the antagonistic, neither is she accustomed to discuss her books even for the benefit of her friends and admirers. The letter, which we print below was written without thought of publication, and is published here because the Editors of this Review believed it to be an admirable description of the quality of an excellent book, a description which gains authority from its source, and asked for the privilege of letting others who have read "Shadows on the Rock" see the author's own estimate of what had been attempted and why. Miss Cather and Governor Cross have both generously given their consent.
H. S. C."

"Dear Governor Cross:-

"I want to thank you most heartily for the most understanding review I have seen of my new book. You seem to have seen what a different kind of method I tried to use from that which I used in the "Archbishop." I tried, as you say, to state the mood and the viewpoint in the title. To me the rock of Quebec is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. There another age persists. There, among the country people and the nuns, I caught something new to me; a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but which I could not but admire. It is hard to state that feeling in language; it was more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacolouthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear. I took the incomplete air and tried to give it what would correspond to a sympathetic musical setting; tried to develop it into a prose composition not too conclusive, not too definite; a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced; a kind of thinking, a mental complexion inherited, left over from the past, lacking in robustness and full of pious resignation.

"Now it seemed to me that the mood of the misfits among the early settlers (and there were a good many) must have been just that. An orderly little French household that went on trying to live decently, just as ants begin to rebuild when you kick their house

down, interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the
forests. And, as you seem to recognize, once having adopted a
tone so definite, once having taken your seat in the close air by
the apothecary's fire, you can't explode into military glory, any
more than you can pour champagne into a salad dressing. (I don't
believe much in rules, but Stevenson laid down a good one when he
said: *you can't mix kinds.*) And really, a new society begins
with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian
villages. Those people brought a kind of French culture there and
somehow kept it alive on that rock, sheltered it and tended it and
on occasion died for it, as if it really were a sacred fire - and
all this temperately and shrewdly, with emotion always tempered by
good sense.

"It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm - it's
so unlike us. But I made an honest try, and I got a great deal of
pleasure out of it, if nobody else does! And surely you'll agree
with me that our writers experiment too little, and produce their
own special brand too readily.

"With deep appreciation of the compliment you pay me in taking
the time to review the book, and my friendliest regards always."

Faithfully

Willa Cather

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
ANN ARBOR

Saturday, April 18, 1936

Dear Professor Phelps,

Willa Cather's glowing appreciation of your Mark Twain essay I am ever so pleased to have read. I return it herewith, and only Cecilia has shared it with me.

Did you know that Erich Walter's *Essay Annual 1936* lists your *Yale Review* article among the 100 best magazine articles of the year? He didn't quite find it available for his purposes to reprint, because he felt he had to have a kind of comprehensive summing up of Mark Twain's literary works. You know that his *Essay Annual* is, after all, kept alive, very much alive, by its classroom market; hence his choices often are definitely -- and properly -- influenced thereby. Have you seen O. J. Campbell's "Twain versus Clemens", reprinted in *Essay Annual 1936*, originally delivered at Columbia, then at Ann Arbor, first published in the winter issue of the *Columbia University Quarterly*? Campbell's view of Twain is, I think, substantially yours, but he cannot claim, as you can, to have brought strikingly fresh evidence to the argument against Van Wyck Brooks *et al*.

Miss Cather also has written me -- a reply to that long letter explaining my reasons for incurring her displeasure by raising the question of the possible reprinting of her note regarding *Lucy Gayheart* and the *Elijah* quotation, "If with all your hearts...." She has almost a phobia, it appears, against certain aspects of American publicity, which she feels -- certainly with some warrant -- are very bad. She concludes her letter, however, in a friendly way:

"There simply never can be any discriminating use of language in a society where there are not delicate distinctions in manners.

"I think you were quite right in your half-expressed suggestion that I made a mistake in allowing a certain letter to Governor Cross to be published. Henry Canby is an old friend of mine, and because I have so often promised him articles and never written them, I yielded to his persuasion. As I recall the letter, it was not very personal in tone and was an answer to some published statements by Governor Cross. It was not at