M·S·C·

May 23, 1925.

Dear Mrs. Luhon:

Your letter came while I was in Maine, and I have
just come back. I have decided to go to the Grand Canyon first and
then to spend a little time at a ranch near Espanola. I hardly
think my friend and I will get to T'das at all, but if there is any
chance of our doing so, I'll signal you and ask whether you have a
house for us. I doubt whether we will stay in one place long enough
to begin housekeeping. I would like to see you in T'das though, and
your own house there.

I had a long walk with Elsie Sargent yesterday
and told her I was sorry I'd knocked poor Amy Lowell so hard that
night we dined with her. I was still in Maine when Miss Lowell died,
and really was awfully sorry.

570 Park Avenue

December 14th

Dear Mabel;

I got back from New Hampshire last week, and as I hadn't had any mail sent on for the last month I found a lot of it awaiting me. I didn't come upon your letter at once. I am so glad that you are sitting to Fechin, as I think he will do a good one of you. He is one of the few painters who make human skin look alive. Please give him my regards, and tell him I like his picture of me better and better as time goes on.

Edith and I had a long, lazy summer at Grand Manan. I went down to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, the first of October and fell to work. I've been working hard ever since. If I keep well I shalln't go away from New York this winter. There are lots of good music here, and the Menuhins arrive just after Christmas. Where is Elsie sergeant, I wonder? I haven't telephoned to find out, because I don't want anyone to know that I am in town.

Edith asks me to send her love, and I send mine always, with my wishes for a Happy Christmas.

M.S.C.

February 5, 1936.

My dear Mabel:

Edith and I were delighted to get your Christmas cards,
and the sprig of sage-brush is still on my desk and still fragrant.

All last spring and part of the summer I spent in taking
care of a very sick friend who lives in Paris, but who came over
to see American doctors. After she and her husband sailed, Edith
and I got on the Rex and beat it for Italy. I was pretty well
worn out, as it was then the third of August and I had been here all
through the heat. We had a perfectly happy summer (what was left
of it) in the Dolomites and in Venice. Nobody knew us, no mail
was forwarded, we were as free as air. I began to enjoy life in
a way I haven't for a long time. About the middle of September
we separated, Edith went to visit friends near Bandol (the Brewsters)
and I went up to Paris to be near my sick friend. Edith joined
me about a month later, and we got home just before Christmas after
a frightful voyage. Edith was carried off the boat by the
stewards of the Aquitania hospital staff. She was quite shaky for
some time afterward, but since New Year's we have both been ever so
well and have begun to catch up with life here again. One gets
dreadfully behind in four or five months abroad. I have not yet
got through with all the mountain of letters that accumulated in my
absence.

Don't you love Anne Lindbergh's book? I took a degree
along with him at Princeton just before that flight. She was with
him, and I saw a good deal of them in the two days we were there.
They were just exactly as they appear in the book.

Please write us a letter some time, and tell us all about
yourself and Tony. We always love to hear from you.

Affectionately from us both,

M.S.C.

December 18, 1936.

My dear Mabel:

I came home two weeks ago to find that a letter from you had been awaiting me a long while; and your letter proves to be just one more trouble in life! It is a trouble because it would give me real pleasure to send a contribution to your hospital, but the truth is, Mabel, that dozens of old friends of mine out in Nebraska are absolutely on the edge of want. For five years, the drought there has been absolute and unbroken. The farm women I have known all my life have raised no potatoes, no gardens, no grain of any kind, no pigs, and some of them have had to kill their chickens because they could not buy the grain to feed even chickens. I am sending them every bit of money I can spare - send them provisions through the home butcher and grocery store. Yesterday, I sent off two great boxes of blankets and warm clothes. I am cutting Christmas out for everybody, except for those destitute people. The farm relief seems to operate successfully only for the loafers, and the New Deal has cut my income down to one-fourth of what it formerly was. You have probably had the same experience, if your investments were in government bonds and industrial concerns, as mine were.

This is prosaic stuff to write, but it is to explain why I do not answer your letter with a check for the hospital. I hope things are not as desperate in New Mexico as they are in Nebraska, and that you and the pueblo will have a Happy Christmas. Edith and I both send much love to you and many good wishes.

June 30, 1938.

Dear Mabel:

You wrote me such a kind letter before you left
New York. It was such a nice way of telling one that one
is growing older.

I want you to know that my brother Charles Douglass,
the one in the family who was closest and dearest to me, died
of a heart seizure in San Diego three weeks ago. Don't
answer this letter please, but I want you to know that I am
going through a hard stretch of road just now. He came on
to New York and spent two weeks and my birthday with me this
winter.

P.S. I do thank you for the copy of THE LAUGHING HORSE you
sent me. I laughed for the first time in a good
many days. You and Mary Austin - indeed, all the
characters are splendid, and the drawings are good,
too.

July 28, 1942.

Dear Mrs. Luhan:

On Friday, July 24, Miss Cather was operated on at Presbyterian Hospital for removal of gall bladder and inflamed appendix. We expect her to make a good recovery. She will be at Harkness Pavilion, Presbyterian Hospital, until August 15. Letters to her should be addressed to Willa Cather, c/o Miss Edith Lewis, 570 Park Avenue. Miss Cather enters the hospital under the name of Miss Edith Lewis, and although the surgeons and house doctor know her real name, letters sent to her there would go astray. The office staff there are very glad to cooperate with her in thus avoiding intrusive visits and telephone calls from newspaper people.

Miss Cather is asking her friends to send no flowers to the hospital. It is impossible for the nurses to take care of flowers in this hot weather, and Miss Cather is always distressed to see flowers neglected. I fear she might try to get up and attend to them herself.

June 12

Dear Mrs. Luhan:

I find an unsent letter to you still in my writing-case.

I held it back to write a less scrappy note, and of course wrote none
at all. My friend and I are just drifting about down here-- We'll be at
the San Gabriel Ranch near Espaniola while I read the proofs of my new
book, then we'll go to the country about Albuquerque. I expect to go to
Taos, but we won't be in any one place long enough to take a home.

I'm hoping to see you before the summer is over.

May 26

Dear Mabel:

I don't know whether you are East or West-- but I have a
feeling you are West, or-- of the way.

We left New York on the 15th, stopped a few days with my mother
and father in Nebraska, and after a day's pause at Lamy came out here. Isn't
Gallup *always* the Hell of a place? I never saw so many low types in one town.
We were both awfully tired and have not been doing much. Edith got a nasty
cold coming out of Nebraska in a prairie heat wave, and we've been curing
that. Tomorrow we go to Zuni, and we hope to make Canyon de Chelley later.
We can't do it unless Edith gets over her cough, for the drivers tell
me it's a harder trip than it's advertised to be. We have very comfortable
rooms here, and Edith has been very happy and relaxed in bed for two days,
while I've made several strange and terrible acquaintances.

My brother and his peerless twins (also his wife and another
daughter aged 13) meet me at Santa Fe June 14. They will have only a week,
so I expect to lead a busy life until they're gone.

July 1st I get to work again, but I've not made up my mind
as to just where. Miss Lewis starts for New York N.Y. June 28th. She will
take another vacation of a month in August and will probably join me in
New Hampshire or New Brunswick.

If you're still in New York I may see you as you go through
Santa Fe. Oh Mabel, we rode from Lamy to Gallup on the same train with
Rin-Tin-Tin, and had the pleasure of meeting him during the half-hour at
Albuquerque. I never was so excited about any celebrity before!

Saturday

Dear Mabel:

Here we are, after a thrilling trip to Canyon de Chelly. I am
wondering if you could rent us the pink house (the one we were in last
summer) for two weeks. Edith has to start for New York on the 23d of June,
but if I found I could work in the pink house I would stay on through
July, coming back to Santa Fe for the last week of June to join my brother.
He would be here for five or six days only.

Of course I don't know whether you are settled yet, or whether
you are in the mood for wanting people about. I wish I could talk to you
by telephone but the line is out of order and they won't give me a connection.

Since I can't talk to you I see no way but to thus abruptly
enquire whether you would take us for boarders-- whether you could make
us a flat rate of twenty-five or thirty dollars each per week, as our
friends at Grand Manan do. If this wouldn't suit you, simply drop me a
line to that effect. I know that renting your guest houses is one thing,
and feeding people quite another and much more inconvenient. On the other
hand there would hardly be time for us to rig up a kitchen in the pink
house if I'm going to be working.

All this is a suggestion which needn't bother you if it's
impractical-- merely dismiss it with a word.

We are most comfortable here, but the Indian Detourists abound
and the motor horn is the worm that dieth not. The de Vargas might be
quieter, but they are building, as you doubtless know. We got in only yester-
day and have seen nobody as yet. I won't make any further plans until I
hear from you. Somehow, I'm awful glad to be back in this country.

M.S.C.

Dear Mabel;

People will always differ about which part of your manu-
script they like best; Mr. Ellis likes it best where I like it
least, I notice. The whole thing is amazingly alive and has
nearly all the qualities I care most about in writing. But the
first part, through "Green Horses", seems to me to have gone
through that undefinable process that makes a work of art, as
distinct from rich material out of which such a work might be
made. The rest is more or less dated and scheduled by your
comings and goings, the accidents and incidents of your life.
But all that first part seems to exist independently of you, is
ever so much bigger and more important than any individual life
can be. I don't know any picture of American life that tells so
much about it, that _is_ it to such an extent. Taking it all in
all, with the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and friends
and servants, town and country, manners and traditions, it is
the whole picture and the whole story of a society and a period.
It surrounds one and takes possession of one; everything is real
and everything is important and there is no room for anything
else in that world. Certainly your extraordinary visual memory
would have made a good painter of you; when I finished this
manuscript I was sore from the number of chins and noses and
cheek-bones I had come up against. But a writer's memory has to
be much more many-sided than a painter's, and I honestly think
you got them all, all the sides. And memory, in this sense, is
only the mass of scars that perceptions leave behind when every

M.S.C.

when every perception is intense enough to be an actual experience. This vitality in presentation never flags throughout the narrative, but when applied to a succession of uprooted people who flitted through your villa in Italy, it can't be as interesting as when it is expended upon a group of people in one society, all inter-rooted and acting upon one another.

The chapters which follow Green Horses are more personal, in a sense, and yet less personal. I never get Parmenter as I do Uncle Carlos or Grandfather Cook. A good deal of the richness dies out of the writing; it's vivid enough, but somehow the appeal to the imagination is vastly less.

I wonder if this is not because a child, the right child, has toward the world a purely artistic attitude, which people can't have after individual life begins to run away with them? Children aren't undeveloped, they are 'all there', but not too much there; they are in that beautiful state of being able to live the life of all the people round them, and to feel every physical thing, grass and trees and flowers and fabrics and even iron stags on the lawn, as they never can feel things afterward. Certainly that's the time when every artist and every imaginative man or woman gets his magical perception, his richest experience of the world about him. There is that same quality in some of the early French chapters, but certainly you do make Buffalo much more thrilling and fuller of extraordinary shades and mysteries of life than Italy or the Riviera. You've not done it as a 'background', you've done it as a world, and I like it that

M.S.C.

way. When I read, it was the world for the time being, surrounded
there
me on every side. I loved the feeling of being enough of
you to go round, as there always was in those old American houses,
enough food and clothes and money and furniture and vitality;
cream and strawberries and sleep and warmth for everybody. A
kind of sumptuousness without purpose, a lack of design, a lack
of economy and therefore of elegance, but such an opulence!
People did queer things behind this front of well-being? Yes, but
they do queer things anyhow, anywhere, and I happen to like this
front. It was like that, and I doubt if it will ever be like
that in the world again. That whole Buffalo section, with New
York and the country caught in its fringes, is complete in its-
self, it's a creation. I 'hand it to you' with a sigh of admir-
ation and envy; a double edged envy. I'd like to have lived there
and had all those things and people rub against me. And I'd like
to have been able to pour it onto paper with all its sights and
sounds and smells and the feeling that is it,--the thing one can't
name but can only taste with the tongue.

Dear Mabel;

People will always differ about which part of your
manuscript they like best; Mr. Ellis likes it best where
I like it least, I notice. The whole thing is amazingly
alive and has nearly all the qualities I care most about
in writing. But the first part, through "Green Horses",
seems to me to have gone through that undefinable process
that makes a work of art, as distinct from rich material
out of which such a work might be made. The rest is more
or less dated and scheduled by your comings and goings,
the accidents and incidents of your life. But all that
first part seems to exist independently of you, is ever so
much bigger and more important than any individual life
can be. I don't know any picture of American life that
tells so much about it, that *is* it to such an extent.
Taking it all in all, with the grandparents and the aunts
and uncles and friends and servants, town and country,
manners and traditions, it is the whole picture and the
whole story of a society and a period. It surrounds one
and takes possession of one; everything is real and
everything is important and there is no room for any-
thing else in the world. Certainly your extraordinary
visual memory would have made a good painter of you;
when I finished this manuscript I was sore from the
number of chins and noses and cheek-bones I had come up

against. But a writer's memory has to be much more
many-sided than a painter's, and I honestly think
you got them all, all the sides. And memory, in this
sense, is only the mass of scars that perceptions
leave behind when every perception is intense enough
to be an actual experience. This vitality in present-
ation never flags throughout the narrative, but when
applied to a succession of uprooted people who flitted
through your villa in Italy, it can't be as interest-
ing as when it is expended upon a group of people in
one society, all inter-rooted and acting upon one an-
other.

The chapters which follow "Green Horses" are
more personal, in a sense, and yet less personal. I
never got Parmenter as I do Uncle Carlos or Grand-
father Cook. A good deal of the richness dies out of
the writing; it's vivid enough, but somehow the appeal
to the imagination is vastly less.

and fabrics and even iron stags on the lawn, as they
never can feel things afterward. Certainly that's the time
when every artist and every imaginative man or woman
gets his magical perception, his richest experience of
the world about him. There is that same quality in some
of the early French chapters, but certainly you do make
Buffalo much more thrilling and fuller of extraordinary
shades and mysteries of life than Italy or the Riviera.
You've not done it as a' background', you've done it as
a world, and I like it that way. When I read, it was the
world for the time being, surrounded me on every side.
I loved the feeling of there being enough of you to go
round, as there always was in those old American houses,
enough food and clothes and money and furniture and
vitality; cream and strawberries and sleep and warmth
for everybody. A kind of sumptuousness without purpose,
a lack of design, a lack of economy, and therefore of
elegance, but such an opulence! People did queer things
behind this front of well-being? Yes, but they do queer
things anyhow, anywhere, and I happen to like this front.
It was like that and I doubt if it will ever be like that
in the world again. That whole Buffalo section, with New
York and the country caught in its fringes, is complete
in itself, it's a creation. I 'hand it to you' with a
sigh of admiration and envy; a double edged envy. I'd
like to have lived there and had all those things and
people rub against me. And I'd like to have been able