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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
Such a kind and earnest and friendly letter4 as you sent me! I have read it over many times. I have been in deep perplexity these last few years, and troubles that concern only one's habits of mind are such personal things that they are hard to talk about. You see I was not made to have to do with affairs—what Mr. McClure5 calls "men and measures." If I get on at that kind of work it is by going at it with the sort of energy most people have to exert only on rare occasions. Consequently I live just about as much during the day as a trapeze performer does when he is on the bars—it's catch the right bar at the right minute, or into the net you go. I feel all the time so dispossessed and bereft of myself. My mind is off doing trapeze work all day long and only comes back to me when it is dog tired and wants to creep into my body and sleep. I really do stand and look at it sometimes and threaten not to take it in at all—I get to hating it so for not being any more good to me. Then reading so much poorly written matter as I have to read has a kind of deadening effect on me somehow. I know that many great and wise people have been able to do that, but I am neither large enough nor wise enough to do it without getting a kind of dread of everything that is made out of words. I feel diluted and weakened by it all the time—relaxed, as if I hadlived in a tepid bath until I shrink from either heat or cold.
I have often thought of trying to get three or four months of free- 3dom a year, but you see when the planning of articles is pretty much in one
person's handshead it is
difficult to hand these many little details over to another person. Your mind
becomes a card-catalogue of notes that are meaningless except as they related to their proper subject. What Mr.
McClure wants is to make me into as good an imitation of Miss Tarbell6 as he can. He wants me to write articles on popular
science, so called, (and other things) for half of each week, and attend to the
office work in the other half. That combination would be quite possible—and, I fear
perfectly deadening. He wants, above all things, good, clear-cut journalism. The
which I do not despise, except but I get nothing to
breathe out of it and no satisfaction.
Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing
stories, again, that I am a good executive and I had
better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right. If I have been going forward at all in the last five
years, It has been progress of the head and not of the hand. At thirty-four7 one ought to have some
sureness in their pen point and some knowledge
facility in turning out a story. In other matters—things about the office—I can
usually do what I set out to do and I can learn by experience, but when it comes to
writing I'm a new-born baby every time—always come into it naked and shivery and
without any bones. I never learn anything about it at all. I sometimes wonder
whether once one can possibly be meant to do the
thing at which they are more blind and inept and blundering than at anything else
in
the world.
But the question of work aside, one has a right to live and reflect and feel a
little. When I wasteaching
5I did. I learned
more or less all the time. But now I have the feeling of standing still except for
a
certain kind of facility in getting the kindsort of material Mr. McClure wants. It's stiff mental
exercise, but it is about as much food to live by as elaborate mental arithmetic
would be.—Of course there are interesting people and interesting things in the day's
work, but it's all like going round the world in a railway train and never getting
off to see anything closer. I have not a reportorial mind—I can't get things in
fleeting glimpses and I can't get any pleasure out of them. And the excitement of
it
doesn't stimulate me, it only wears me out.
Now the kind of life that makes one feel empty and shallow and superficial, that makes one dread to read and dread to think, can't be good for one, can it? It can't be the kind of life one was meant to live. I do think that kind of excitement does to my brain exactly what I have seen alcohol do to men's. It seems to spread one's very brain cells apart so that they don't touch. Everything leaks out as the power does in a broken circuit.
So whether or not the chief is right about my never doing much writing, I think one's
immortal soul is to be considered a little. His thrives on this perpetual debauch,
but five yearsmore of it will make me a fat, sour,
ill-tempered lady—and fussy, worst of all! And assertive; an all people who do feats on the flying trapeze and never think are as
cocky as terriers after rats, you know.
I have to lend a hand at home now and then, and a good salary is a good thing. Still, if I stopped working next summer8 I would have money engough enough to live very simply for three or four years. That would
give me time to pull myself together. I doubt whether I would ever write very much—though that is hard to tell about for sure; since I
was fifteen I have not had a patch of leisure six months long. When I was on a
newspaper I had one month vacation a year, and when I was teaching I had two. Still,
I don't think that my pen would ever travel very fast, even along smooth roads. But
I would write a little—"and save the soul besides."9
It's so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul.
It's so foolish to lose your real pleasure for the supposedpleasures of the chase—or of the stock exchange. You remember poor
Goldsmith10
It is really like that. I do feel like such an rabbit most of the time. I dont mean that I get panic-stricken. I believe I am still called "executive" at the office. But inside I feel like that. Isn't there a new disease, beloved by psychologists, called "split personality"?
Of all these things and many others I long to talk to you. In lieu of so doing I have
been reading again this evening "Martha's
Lady."12 I do think it is almost the saddest and loveliest of stories. It
humbles and desolates me every time I read it—and somehow makes me want willing to begin all over and try to be good;
like a whipping used to do when I was little. Perhaps after Christmas I can slip up
to Boston13 for a day. Until then a world of
love to you and all the well wishes of this season, an hundred fold warmer and more
heartfelt than they are wont to be. I shall think of you and of Mrs. Fields14 often on Christmas Day.
As I pick up the sheets of this letter I am horrified—but I claim indulgence because I have left wide margins.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0145.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0145
- Contents
- Document is four leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Sarah Orne Jewett1
- Date letter was written
- December 19 [1908]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by Jewett's 13 December 1908 letter to which Cather is responding.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Sarah Orne Jewett Correspondence (MS AM 1743), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
82 Washington Place (New York City): Cather's second apartment in New York City and the first one she shared with Edith Lewis, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough. Cather and Lewis lived here from 1908 to 1911.
On 13 December 1908, Jewett wrote Cather a long and famous letter of advice, suggesting that Cather's fiction writing was being "hindered" by her editorial work at McClure's and that she should consider making her "Nebraska life" the subject of fiction.
Cather had just turned thirty-five.
Cather did not take a leave from McClure's until 1911.
Person Annotations
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and
novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes
in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie
Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South
Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated
throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and
her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs,
was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural
and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148
Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a
spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote
important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to
write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character,
which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her
to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine
so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After
Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and
her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories
of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in
her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs
with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three
American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist
and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County,
PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough
Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling
in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly
taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the
Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing
and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France,
studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was
hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon
Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she
would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work
for McClure’s, The History of the
Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S.
McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with
fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the
competing American Magazine, where she worked until
1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather
arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was
still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two
women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm
she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived
with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other
in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to
Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in
Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.
Goldsmith, Oliver (1730-1774). Anglo-Irish writer. Born in Ireland, son of a clergyman, Oliver Goldsmith was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, receiving his degree in 1749. He traveled through Europe in the early 1750s, arriving penniless in London in 1756. After doing hack work, his essays attracted notice and the friendship of such men as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Edmund Burke. His extravagance led him to more hack work, but he also produced lasting work in such genres as the novel (The Vicar of Wakefield), drama (She Stoops to Conquer), and poetry (The Deserted Village). Cather quotes from The Deserted Village (1770) in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett (#0145), and uses a phrase from Goldsmith’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) for the title of Obscure Destinies (1932).
Fields, Annie Adams (1835-1915). Literary hostess, author, and social
reformer. At age 20, Annie Adams married James T. Fields,
partner in the Boston publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Both before
and after her husband’s death in 1881, Fields often entertained important
American, British, and European authors at her home at 148 Charles Street in
Boston, MA. After James’ death, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose books were
published by Ticknor & Fields, began sharing Annie’s homes at 148
Charles Street and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA. Cather met Fields in Boston in
1908, a meeting Cather described in "The House on Charles Street," an essay
reviewing Memories of a Hostess (a volume of
selections from Fields' journals, 1922). A revised version of this essay,
retitled "148 Charles Street," appeared in Not Under
Forty (1936). After Jewett’s death in 1909, Fields edited The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911), which
included several letters to Cather. Fearing that 148 Charles Street would
become a museum after her death, Fields requested that it be torn down.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Ring and the Book (1868 to 1869) by Robert Browning
The Deserted Village (1770) by Oliver Goldsmith
"Martha's Lady," The Queen's Twin (1899) by Sarah Orne Jewett
