Henry Walcott Boynton (December 6, 1915)

#0338: Willa Cather to Henry Walcott Boynton, December 6, 1915

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ 5 Bank Street³ New York² December 6, 1915 My Dear Mr Boynton¹:

It seems impertinent to thank a critic whose opinion one values; but I hope it is not amiss for me to say that your sympathetic understanding⁴ of what I tried to do in my last book⁵, and of some of the difficulties⁶ that made it hard for me to carry out my intentions, gives me very deep gratification and encouragement. I would also like to tell you that your review⁷ of “O Pioneers!”⁸ was a very real help to me in undertaking the longer book. In that review⁹ you suggested some feeling on your part that the cow-puncher’s experience of the West was not the only experience possible there, and you seemed to feel that one might give some truthful account of life in a new country without pretending to a jovial brutality which, however ~~one~~ much one might like to have it, cannot be successfully affected—at least, not by women.

Very sincerely yours Willa Sibert Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0338.xml
Letter identifier: 0338
Contents: Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
Person to whom letter was written: Henry Walcott Boynton ¹
Date letter was written: December 6, 1915
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (#6494-6494-i), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA

Individual Annotations

5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.

Boynton begins his commentary in the Nation on The Song of the Lark by hypothesizing that protagonist Thea Kronborg's "three weeks relation with" Fred Ottenburg "will attract more attention from a certain class of readers than all the rest of the story." However, he characterizes the "episode" as realistic and "important, but not determining or even focal." Moving on from this, he writes, "Miss Cather has attempted that most dangerous of feats--to trace the genesis of genius." In the New York Evening Post, he similarly approves Cather's tactful handling of "a single sex episode" and praises Cather for representing Thea Kronborg, "the rare type of the woman artist, born almost with a sense of her calling, and making her way steadily, against all obstacles, or by means of all obstacles, towards the perfect fruitage of her genius. True interpretations of this type are almost rarer than the type itself."

Cather seems to be attributing the anonymous review in the Nation to Boynton. That reviewer favorably compared O Pioneers! to works set in the West by David Graham Phillips and Frank Norris. Noting that O Pioneers! is "set in the same big primitive fecund America," the reviewer praises Cather for "dwell[ing] with unforced emotion upon the suffering and glory of those who have taught a desert to feed the world."

Person Annotations

0310

Boynton, H. W. (1869-1947). American critic. Connecticut-born Henry Walcott Boynton received his BA and MA from Amherst College in Massachusetts and taught English at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA from 1892 to 1901. He reviewed books for the Atlantic Monthly from 1901 to 1904, for the Nation and the New York Evening Post from 1912, and for Bookman from 1915. Cather was particularly pleased with his reviews of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), writing him to thank him particularly for his review of The Song of the Lark, and inviting him to her Friday teas. Boynton also edited volumes of American and British classic works.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

"The Great Novel Is Only a Dream but a Chapter in It Is Willa Sibert Cather's The Song of the Lark," New York Evening Post (November 1915) by H. W. Boynton

"Varieties of Realism," Nation (October 1915) by H. W. Boynton

The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather

"[Untitled review of O Pioneers!]," Nation (September 4, 1913)

O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather