maintained friendships from her early years in Red Cloud, Lincoln, and Pittsburgh for many years and also enjoyed new friendships. Though some of the people she befriended were fellow luminaries, like Robert Frost, Sarah Orne Jewett, Yehudi Menuhin, S. S. McClure, and Alfred Knopf, she seemed to get the deepest satisfaction out of old friends with whom she shared a long history. Unfortunately, the two relationships that were likely the most profound in her adult life—Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Edith Lewis—are not well represented in her correspondence. Only a small handful of letters from Cather to these two women are known to survive.
T HOUGH THE MISSING LETTERS to Lewis and McClung Hambourg are a disappointing gap in the record, we are incredibly lucky in the range and richness of Cather letters that did survive. Thanks to the stewardship of dozens of archives around the world (please see note about archives, page 691) thousands of letters written by Willa Cather are now available to us. The attitudes, emotions, and voice of Cather’s letters are as diverse as one would expect from any human being over the course of sixty years. Yet in another way, there is a consistency of personality throughout all of them, a tang of Cather’s character that one can sense in all of her prose. It is difficult and perhaps fruitless to try to define this quality, but one might call it frankness or self-possession. Cather is always vitally herself, even when she confesses anxious self-consciousness, and in spite of her habit of writing falsehoods about trivial matters. Her voice in her letters, as in her fiction, emerges from an emotional and intellectual commitment to what it is she has to say. Her writing is not pretentious and does not seem, as Cather said about the work of another writer, “as if she were packing a trunk for someone else, and trying conscientiously to put everything in.” * Instead, when reading Cather’s letters one can feel the force of a vibrant, individual personality deeply interested in things.
First page of November 6, 1938, letter from Willa Cather to her brother Roscoe
Cather herself identified this ability to be interested as the source of her strength as a writer. In a 1938 letter to her brother Roscoe, she wrote, “As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer.” † What she called in the same letter “the heat under the simple words” is present throughout her correspondence, from the funny reports of Red Cloud life she wrote when she was a teenager in the 1880s to the painful letters of the 1940s when she despaired at her own worn-down body and the heartbreaking destruction of a world at war.
The voice of Cather’s correspondence is in many ways strikingly consistent with the voice of her fiction: it is confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, and concerned with profound ideas without relying on heavily philosophical language. In other ways, the style of her voice in the correspondence is significantly different than the polished voice of her fiction: one senses that the letters are Cather’s voice without the refinement of the revision process. The letters sometimes reveal Cather as a rather histrionic character. Her correspondents get regular tirades about poor health, challenges of work and housekeeping, and exhaustion. She can be, in modern parlance, a drama queen. This results in claims that are not measured or deliberate, but instead made for dramatic rhetorical effect. For example, in a 1916 letter to her brother Douglass, she discusses some conflict she had with him and the rest of her family and huffs, “I think I’ve had my belting, and it has taken the fizz out of me all right—and I’ll tell you this, it’s positively shipwreck for work. I doubt whether I’ll ever write anything worth while again. To write well you have to be all wrapped up in your game and think it awfully worth while. I only hope I’m not so
T HOUGH THE MISSING LETTERS to Lewis and McClung Hambourg are a disappointing gap in the record, we are incredibly lucky in the range and richness of Cather letters that did survive. Thanks to the stewardship of dozens of archives around the world (please see note about archives, page 691) thousands of letters written by Willa Cather are now available to us. The attitudes, emotions, and voice of Cather’s letters are as diverse as one would expect from any human being over the course of sixty years. Yet in another way, there is a consistency of personality throughout all of them, a tang of Cather’s character that one can sense in all of her prose. It is difficult and perhaps fruitless to try to define this quality, but one might call it frankness or self-possession. Cather is always vitally herself, even when she confesses anxious self-consciousness, and in spite of her habit of writing falsehoods about trivial matters. Her voice in her letters, as in her fiction, emerges from an emotional and intellectual commitment to what it is she has to say. Her writing is not pretentious and does not seem, as Cather said about the work of another writer, “as if she were packing a trunk for someone else, and trying conscientiously to put everything in.” * Instead, when reading Cather’s letters one can feel the force of a vibrant, individual personality deeply interested in things.
First page of November 6, 1938, letter from Willa Cather to her brother Roscoe
Cather herself identified this ability to be interested as the source of her strength as a writer. In a 1938 letter to her brother Roscoe, she wrote, “As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer.” † What she called in the same letter “the heat under the simple words” is present throughout her correspondence, from the funny reports of Red Cloud life she wrote when she was a teenager in the 1880s to the painful letters of the 1940s when she despaired at her own worn-down body and the heartbreaking destruction of a world at war.
The voice of Cather’s correspondence is in many ways strikingly consistent with the voice of her fiction: it is confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted, and concerned with profound ideas without relying on heavily philosophical language. In other ways, the style of her voice in the correspondence is significantly different than the polished voice of her fiction: one senses that the letters are Cather’s voice without the refinement of the revision process. The letters sometimes reveal Cather as a rather histrionic character. Her correspondents get regular tirades about poor health, challenges of work and housekeeping, and exhaustion. She can be, in modern parlance, a drama queen. This results in claims that are not measured or deliberate, but instead made for dramatic rhetorical effect. For example, in a 1916 letter to her brother Douglass, she discusses some conflict she had with him and the rest of her family and huffs, “I think I’ve had my belting, and it has taken the fizz out of me all right—and I’ll tell you this, it’s positively shipwreck for work. I doubt whether I’ll ever write anything worth while again. To write well you have to be all wrapped up in your game and think it awfully worth while. I only hope I’m not so
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