This volume includes 566 letters, less than one-fifth of those that have been preserved, but it seems clear that the ones chosen by the editors are representative. This is not a sanitized selection. A number reveal that Willa Cather (1873-1947) was not always able to transcend the prejudices of her time; in an 1897 letter, she praises her boss by telling him, “You’re a white man sure,” and complains in 1924 that black maids—“nice little darkies”—too often “get tired of working and ‘go South.’ ” She writes to her brother Roscoe in 1916 that her close friend Isabelle McClung “has married a very brilliant and perfectly poisonous Jew,” and, in 1922, she refers to John Galsworthy’s “new Jew play.”
The willingness of the editors to include letters with such distasteful expressions suggests that the reader is able to take the portrait of Cather provided by the letters as a whole at face value. Many demonstrate the intensity and loyalty of Cather’s feelings for those she admired and cared about. In a 1905 letter, she declares that Isabelle McClung has been her moral guide, since Cather had “never known her to do one thing unkind or ungenerous or ignoble. . . . If I contemplated doing anything base or ugly, she is the one who would detect it first and feel it most keenly.” Jan Hambourg, the “perfectly poisonous Jew,” eventually gained her respect and affection. After Isabelle McClung Hambourg died in 1938, Cather wrote to Edith McClung, Isabelle’s sister, praising “Jan’s absolute devotion to her [Isabelle] during her long illness,” noting especially the way Jan would “give her her bath, lift her when it was hard for her to rise, and by so many delicate attentions disguise her actual infirmities from everyone.”
Cather’s feelings for her family, especially her parents and her two brothers, were equally long-lived and intense. She wrote to her mother in 1919: “I find myself loving to do things with you now, just as I did when I was a little girl.” And in a 1925 letter, she deprecates quarreling, saying, “I can’t quarrel. . . . I couldn’t be angry with you now if I tried. I think one of the consolations of growing older is that one comes to understand one’s parents better. I am too much like you in many ways to criticize you.” Her brother Douglass died unexpectedly in 1938, a few months before the death of Isabelle McClung Hambourg. She wrote to a friend: “With Douglass and Isabelle both gone out of my life, I scarcely know how I shall go on.” In 1945 she wrote to the widow of her brother Roscoe that Roscoe “was my best critic. . . . He knew me better than I knew myself. . . . The fact is that now I have no one to judge me, no one to tell me if I am off the true pitch—no other judgment that I care a bang about.”
Only a few of the letters touch on politics. When the United States first entered the Great War in 1917, Cather believed, with Woodrow Wilson, that the cause was just, writing to her sister Elsie that “the United States has never had such a chance before; no country ever has. We can literally save Democracy—or lose it—for the whole world.” When the armistice was declared, Cather was certain that something magnificent had been achieved. She wrote to her aunt, whose son G. P. Cather had been killed in action, “Think of it, for the first time since human society has existed upon this planet, the sun rose this morning upon a world in which not one great monarchy or tyranny existed.”
Only a few years later, however, the world transformation she had hoped for had not happened. In a 1922 letter, she wrote, “It seems to me that everything has gone wrong since the Armistice. Why they celebrate that day with anything but fasts and sack-cloth and ashes, I don’t know.”
Claude Wheeler, the main character of Cather’s One of Ours (1922), was based on the life and death of her cousin G. P. Cather. Numerous letters testify to her continuing admiration and affection for the soldiers themselves. She proudly exclaimed to her brother Roscoe, “Aren’t the American boys some soldiers!” In December 1918, she wrote:
Cather’s great novel My Ántonia (1918) and some of her best stories, such as “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930) and “The Bohemian Girl” (1912), feature Czech immigrants. Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, became one of her favorite correspondents. In 1939, six months after the Munich Agreement, Cather despaired, writing, “What is the use? Hitler entered Prague last night. President Masaryk was an old friend of mine. He was a scholar and a lover of letters. In my childhood I had many Czech friends. I love their way of life. And what about ‘British honor,’ which I have always believed in?”
British honor, however, was not dead after all: In 1943, Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “Isn’t Churchill a great old boy? Isn’t England a great old land?” She fortified herself, she told her brother Roscoe, by making “a game of having my four o’clock tea every afternoon with Winston Churchill!” She needed any consolation she could get. It was “bad enough to have all our splendid young men die,” but she especially regretted that “so many of the boys from my own little town in Nebraska have been shunted out to those terrible Pacific Islands, where the hardships are so much greater than they can be anywhere in Europe. To be killed may be uncomfortable, but to lie in slime and be eaten up by bugs is a punishment no boy deserves.”
Cather did what she could. In 1943, she was “wearing my right hand in a brace again—result of having to answer too many letters from splendid soldier boys.”
The personal toll of the second great war of her lifetime, and the deaths of many lifelong friends, led Cather to declare, in October 1945, “I don’t care about writing any more books. Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love.” Back in 1923, she had felt differently. She complained to Dorothy Canfield Fisher that the attention she was receiving was keeping her from writing. It seemed as though “people don’t in the least want one to write.” No doubt they meant well, but “if they devil me so I can’t write,” Cather emphasized, “they destroy my game, my fun, my reward, the whole splendor and glow of life—all there is for me.”
During the Great Depression, Cather was attacked by critics such as Granville Hicks for her failure to deal with current social problems. She was certain, however, as she put it in 1934, that “they [her books] do more for more people than I could personally do if I were as strong as iron and devoted my whole life to good works. I don’t write ’em with that purpose, but they have that result. Any kind of integrity helps in this world, and I have my own kind.”
Despite, or rather because of, her own commitment to the craft of writing, Cather thought it was “sheer nonsense to teach ‘Creative Writing’ in colleges,” especially since colleges seemed to be failing in the more fundamental task of teaching their students “to write passably clear and correct English”—perhaps because the professors themselves could not “write passably clear and correct English.” Cather confided that “more than half of the twenty-eight professors who have written to me within the last few months were quite unable to use ‘which’ and ‘that’ and ‘would’ and ‘should’ correctly.”
Today, many professors writing on Willa Cather insist on categorizing her as a lesbian writer. That there is no evidence that Willa Cather ever had sex with anybody, man or woman, is not a problem; Sharon O’Brien, a leading Cather scholar, is typical in rejecting “genital sexual experience with women” as a criterion of lesbianism in favor of “a more broadly conceived focus on ‘woman-identified’ experience.” According to O’Brien, Cather’s writings express “a lesbian identity,” at least according to this broader definition.
The 566 letters in this collection indeed reveal a woman who cared deeply for her friends, most of whom were women, but also a woman who loved her family, was a patriot who revered her country’s soldiers, and (most important for us today) wrote stories and novels informed by a quiet integrity expressed in a total commitment to the highest standards of her art. If these qualities constitute a “lesbian identity,” then Willa Cather can, indeed, be categorized as a lesbian writer. On the other hand, it is also possible to think of her simply as a great writer—and an admirable, if imperfect, human being.
James Seaton, professor of English at Michigan State, is the author, most recently, of Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative.
