Mr. Greenslet

1939

* * * Also, I want to thank you for the copy of the COLLEGE READER you sent me. Will you be annoyed if I call your attention to some errors in the biographical notice of William Archer? Mr. Archer and I were friends from 1908 until the time of his death. I went to London every year then for McClure's, and he was my guide and adviser whenever I was there. He took me to George Meredith's funeral. We saw the Abbey Theater Company the first night they ever played in London, sat in Yeats' box with Lady Gregory, etc.

When I came back from a stay in Italy in January 1921, THE GREEN GODDESS was in full swing in New York. I found a letter from Archer awaiting me at my house, had dinner with him as soon as possible, and he told me the whole story of THE GREEN GODDESS. He had written me the story of the play, indeed, in 1916 or 1917. The play was written in those years, not in 1920, as this biographer states. He wrote the play to relieve the boredom of his war position as Censor of the Dublin, Ireland, Post Office. Archer's interest was always in plays with a spiritual motive and real burning purpose. But he had always been interested in the pure mechanics of the drama, though he had no admiration for that sort of play. He enlivened his routine in Dublin by making a purely mechanical play where the interest was produced by time-honored situations dressed in modern clothes. Play carpentry, he called it. He thought it succeeded more because Arliss played it than for any other reason. He rather liked making so much money, of course.

The above notice speaks rather carelessly of his interest in Ibsen. Ibsen was the great enthusiasm of his life. He not only published Ibsen's plays in England, as your biographer said, but he was the sole translator of many of the best plays, among them A DOLL'S HOUSE, PILLARS OF SOCIETY, GHOSTS, AN ENEMY OF SOCIETY, and Edmund Gosse translated THE MASTER BUILDER. These are the only Ibsen plays I happen to have in my bookcase, but I know that Archer translated still other Ibsen plays. I wonder why your editors chose THE GREEN GODDESS at all, but since they did, I think the introductory note should have been more accurate. Of course, the play was first produced in Philadelphia, December 27, 1920, but Archer had written me an outline of it in '16 or '17.

I don't suppose you have much to do with the textbook section of the publishing house, so perhaps it is foolish in me to trouble you. One does, however, hate to see an old friend so casually dismissed. The man who first translated and popularized Ibsen in English did a great service to the English stage.

February 12th [1940]

Dear F.G.

The morning paper tells me that you have lost
an old friend -- one with whom you used to do pleasant
things. I write this line merely to tell you [about] that
I am sorry. Within the last three years I have lost so
many friends, old friends with whom I used to do pleasant
things, that the world about me, my personal world, begins
to look pretty empty. I know I am often a shrew when books
or "propositions" rub me the wrong way; but I have a heart,
and I am sad when my old friends lose their friends: it
makes such a difference in one's life.

F.G. annotates: " John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir"

2

You've had, you know, great luck -- very fortunate,
singularly fortunate coincidences. Seeing your first airplane rise
against the Alban Hills, for instance! Congratulations and may the
good luck continue!

Faithfully yours

Willa Cather

By the way on page 54 shouldn't Zinsser the scientist be Zinsner. I
heard him speak of Wooberry.

M.S.C.

October 30, 1945.

Dear Ferris Greenslet:

On the 25th of September my brother Roscoe died at his home in Colusa, California. He had not been ill previously and he died in his sleep. My brother Roscoe was less than two years older than I, and I had no memories of infancy or childhood in which he was not present. I had four brothers, but Roscoe and I always kept together. All my early most vivid memories of the Northwest and Southwest came from the long trips that we used to take together on horseback and in buck-wagons, long before there were motor roads through the mountains. (Of course, there were plenty of motors in the cities.) On one of the wildest of these trips, across the Laramie Mountains, Isabelle McClung accompanied us.

My close companionship with my brother was never broken. He brought his wife and daughters to visit me in New Mexico when I was writing the Archbishop. His lovely daughters spent two summers with me at Grand Manan. These autobiographical details are merely to let you know that I have been really very much under the weather, and for the first time in my life feel that somewhere within me a spring is broken. It has been a heavy task to reply to letters from devoted friends of my brother, and to accomplish this I have excused myself from other correspondence.

I am pleased that you sent me an autographed copy of THE PRACTICAL COGITATOR, and I look forward to reading it with pleasure. Just now my eyes are bothering me, for the first time in my life, and I am reading only books in very large type and widely-spaced.

I will appreciate your kindness if you will destroy this incoherent letter as soon as you have read it. I can scarcely keep up any sort of relationship with an old friend without calling to his attention a shock which has made a change in my life. I had been working very happily at Northeast Harbor, Maine, all summer. I had finished a story that had been long in my mind, and had done a great deal of research work upon a more ambitious project which had been long in my mind. I was totally unprepared for bad news.