 Willa Cather as Self-Promoter: "All Advertising Was Good."
David Porter, Skidmore College
In Willa Cather's 1914 ghost-written autobiography of S. S. McClure, for whom she had worked from 1906-12, the publisher comments that "all advertising was good" (The Autobiography of S. S. McClure [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997], 145). The phrase was clearly still on Cather's mind two years later when she wrote her story "The Diamond Mine" in 1916. In the first paragraph of the story she notes that her singer-heroine, Cressida Garnet, "was too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertising was good." And she repeats the same words near the end of the story when she explains why her heroine delayed by a week her return from London so that she could sail home on the ill-fated Titanic: "Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea monster-she still believed that all advertising was good...." (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings [New York: Library of America, 1992], 397, 430).
There was a side of Willa Cather herself which also believed that "all advertising was good," and throughout her life she worked assiduously to promote her books and herself. Cather constantly encouraged and even hectored her publishers in their promotional efforts-indeed, her decision to change in 1920 from Houghton Mifflin to Alfred A. Knopf was motivated almost entirely by her frustration with what she saw as Houghton Mifflin's ineptness and recalcitrance in these efforts, and her conviction that Knopf would do far better. Not only did Cather herself regularly review the publicity materials that her publishers prepared, but she herself participated actively in seeking out advertising opportunities, noting favorable reviews that could be used for promotional purposes, and even in writing advertising copy-three biographical statements about herself, dust-jacket copy for her books, even an interview of herself that for decades was accepted as a bona fide interview-until the typescript showed up and revealed that Cather herself had written every word of it!
The principal purpose of this website entry is to make readily available to Cather readers and students selections from these anonymously-composed publicity materials. In some ways these short pieces come as close to autobiography as anything Cather ever wrote, for although she has been called "the most autobiographical of writers" (Merrill Skaggs, After the World Broke in Two: the Later Novels of Willa Cather [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990], 10), Cather earns this designation because she draws so heavily on her own life in her fiction. As for autobiography itself, she wrote little of it, and nothing remotely resembling the book-length autobiographies written by two close contemporaries, Edith Wharton's A Backward Glance (1934) and Ellen Glasgow's two "backward glances," A Certain Measure (1943) and The Woman Within (1944). In Cather's case we also have nothing comparable to what another contemporary left us, the extensive diary and the thousands of letters that provide such insight into the life and work of Virginia Woolf. There is no evidence that Cather kept a diary, and if she did, we may be sure that she took care to destroy it. As for letters, close friends such as Isabelle Hambourg and Edith Lewis burned the great majority of letters they had from Cather, and in her will Cather ruled out direct quotation of all surviving letters. Against this backdrop, Cather's anonymous publicity materials take on particular interest and importance, for they are filled with information about Cather's life, with "backward glances" at her evolving career, and with her own commentary on individual books both as they appear and in retrospect.
By its nature, autobiography skews the truth, as even so candid an autobiographer as Leonard Woolf admits: "I have tried in the following pages to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but of course I have not succeeded. I do not think that I have anywhere deliberately manipulated or distorted the truth into untruth, but I am sure that one sometimes does this unconsciously" (Leonard Woolf, Growing. An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961], 9).
Cather's autobiographical statements also take liberty with what they include and omit, even with the facts themselves, and the portraits they create differ sharply one from another. That they date from different periods of her life explains these differences in part, but other factors come into play as well.
Two features in particular distinguish these materials from the autobiographical writings mentioned above and shape the choices Cather makes in writing them: all are unsigned, with the expectation that a reader will assume that someone else has written them; and all are written as promotional pieces. From one point of view, both of these conditions encourage Cather to play free with the truth: no one will know that it is she who has done so, and hyperbole and license are the givens of "puff pieces" such as these, the purpose of which is less to "tell the whole truth" than to sell the author and her books. From a different point of view, however, both features encourage their own honesty and candor. Most autobiographers, aware as they are that readers will know who has written the book, are reluctant either to play too free with the facts or to overstep the bounds of modesty. Cather feels no such constraints. Inasmuch as she is writing what are by nature puff pieces, and without mention of her authorship, she can attribute to herself whatever qualities she believes she possesses, whatever vision she has of the position she occupies, or would like to occupy, as a writer. The genre, and its anonymity, encourage a kind of honesty that is unlikely in a signed autobiography. Thus even at a time when Cather knows her reputation is in decline, she can claim on the jacket of Shadows on the Rock that she is an author "whose title to foremost of living, if not of all, American novelists few would challenge." The statement on the jacket of Sapphira and the Slave Girl that "Sapphira's African slaves are, and doubtless were meant to be, the most interesting figures in the book," is even more telling: it is the sort of candid comment Cather rarely makes about her fiction, but here, protected by the anonymity of a blurb, she types it on her own typewriter.
The promotional materials reproduced below represent a side of Willa Cather that is relatively unfamiliar. We tend to think of her as an author who jealously protected her privacy so as to dedicate herself entirely to her art, not as someone who in fact throughout her life also devoted a great deal of time and energy to promoting her career and her own image. In fact, however, these materials themselves exemplify Cather's penchant for playing both of these roles simultaneously. On the one side, they evoke an iconic Willa Cather who is "our greatest living woman novelist" and the author of "novel[s] to rank with the finest of this or any age" (to quote one of her jackets). This is a Cather we easily recognize, as she wanted us to do, an author whose first goal throughout her career was to reach the heights of what she had during her university years called the "kingdom of art." On the other side is a less familiar Willa Cather, the creator of these very pieces. Again she is an author, but one who throughout her career devotes her writing skills to penning advertising copy and otherwise promoting herself. This other Cather is a tireless and savvy go-getter out to foster her career, win public recognition, and reap the attendant financial rewards.
Cather was fully aware of the gulf between these two roles that she played so vigorously throughout her life-indeed, from her earliest writings on she frequently notes the tensions between them. In a famous passage written during her university years she compares the artist to a pilgrim: "In the kingdom of art there is not God, but one God, and his service is so exacting that there are few men born of woman who are strong enough to take the vows. There is no paradise offered for a reward to the faithful, no celestial bowers, no houris, no scented wines; only death and the truth. ‘Thy truth then be thy dower'" (Bernice Slote, The Kingdom of Art [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966], 17). During the same period she also castigates those artists who betray this lofty pilgrimage in order to seek popularity, wealth, and success, often at the sacrifice of "the truth." Here is what she writes about one American novelist: "Well, Mr. [Marion F.] Crawford is a true American; he has made a ‘good thing' out of literature, he is what we call ‘a success.' He publishes a new novel every few months and writes countless ‘articles' beside. He is a very rich man. In each of his bulky volumes there is evidence of his talent, talent that if it had been treated with reverence might have been invaluable to the world.... But I suppose the curse of having sold one's self is that one is always branded with a trade mark and can never escape from the habits of his vice. Truth once betrayed tracks the betrayer to his grave, he had better go out at once like Judas and hang himself. Like Midas, the Phrygian, when he seeks for beauty he will find only gold, gold that cannot buy perfection" (William M. Curtin, The World and the Parish [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970], 261-62). And in a passage evoked by Oscar Wilde, Cather describes the choice that every artist must make: "To every man who has really great talent there are two ways open, the narrow one and the wide, to be great and suffer, or to be clever and comfortable, to bring up white pearls from the deep or to blow iris-hued bubbles from the froth on the surface" (Kingdom of Art, 391).
Cather herself consistently avoided making the choice that she so emphasizes in this last passage, seeking instead to straddle the gulf between these roles, to be both the artist who seeks for truth and beauty and the self-promoter who is willing to bend the truth when doing so will promote his/her artistic creations. The three autobiographical statements included below are in fact filled with untruths and half-truths, among them the claim, introduced in her very first such statement, that she was born in 1876 rather than 1873, a falsification that makes her 27 rather than 30 at the publication of her first book, April Twilights, and that persists throughout her life and even onto her gravestone in Jaffrey, New Hampshire! That Cather had mixed feelings about playing the latter role seems implicit in the fact that she always published these promotional materials anonymously, and in her 1920 essay "On the Art of Fiction" she again stresses the incompatibility of the two roles: "A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand-a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods-or it should be an art..." (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, 939-40). Whatever her qualms about accepting the compromises entailed in her promotional activities, Cather nonetheless continued to play both roles to the end of her career-we even have the typescript in which in 1940 she completely rewrote the central portion of the dust-jacket blurb for her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
Not only do the materials included below reveal a little known side of Willa Cather, but they also suggest new perspectives for understanding her fiction. The very fact that Cather chose to play these potentially contradictory roles throws valuable light on the internal complexities of many characters she creates, and on the vigorous thematic tensions that are so characteristic of her fiction. In particular, Thea Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark and probably Cather's most autobiographical character, reveals not only both of these sides but also the powerful tensions that can exist between them.
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As noted above, the topic focal to this website entry, Willa Cather's interest in and talent for self-advertisement, throws fascinating light both on the novelist's character and life and on many of the fictional works she created, and the commentary contained here provides no more than a starting point. The following sources contain further information on these materials and on the interesting questions and perspectives they suggest, and the bibliographies in each of them suggest numerous additional resources to explore. The three articles from the WCPM N&R are, of course, available on line at this very website.
Porter, David H. "Cather on Cather: Two Early Self-Sketches." WCPM N&R 45.3 (Winter/Spring 2002): 55-60. [On the 1903 and 1915 biographical pieces.]
------. "Cather on Cather II: Two Recent Acquisitions at Drew University." WCPM N&R 46.3 (Winter/Spring 2003): 49-58. [On the 1926 sketch and interview.]
------. "Cather on Cather III: Dust-Jacket Copy on Willa Cather's Books." WCPM N&R 48.3 (Winter/Spring 2005): 51-60. [On the first-edition dust-jacket blurbs from all of Cather's books.]
------. On the Divide: the Many Lives of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. [Book-length study of the topic, including extensive discussion of the influence of Mary Baker Eddy on Cather and on her interest in advertising.]
MATERIALS COMPOSED ANONYMOUSLY BY WILLA CATHER FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROMOTING HER BOOKS:
Literary Note (1903)
Internal evidence makes it clear that Cather herself wrote the following brief piece to help promote her first book, April Twilights.
Miss Willa Sibert Cather, whose first book, a delightful volume of poems entitled April Twilights, will be published at once, was born near Winchester, Va., in 1876. When she was ten years old, the family moved to a ranch in Southwestern Nebraska, and for two years the child ran wild, living mostly on horseback, scouring the sparsely-settled country, visiting the Danes and Norwegians, tasting the wild-plum wine made by the old women, and playing with the little herd girls, who wore men's hats, and were not in the least afraid of rattlesnakes, which they killed with clods of earth. Even when the family moved later to Red Cloud, she still kept up her friendship for the Norwegian farmer folk, whose business brought them often to her father's office. During the ranch period and for some time after going to Red Cloud, Miss Cather did not go to school at all, and her only reading was an old copy of Ben Jonson's plays, a Shakespeare, a Byron, and The Pilgrim's Progress, which latter she said she read through eight times in one winter. The first two years of her course at the University of Nebraska, where she graduated in 1895, were spent in the hardest kind of study, but then she discovered herself and began to write a little, mostly for her own pleasure and to satisfy the new craving for expression. She edited a creditable college magazine, and did remarkably discriminating dramatic criticism for the Nebraska State Journal. With all this she read voraciously, both in French and in English, and laid the foundation of her wide acquaintance with both literatures. Every vacation she went back to the sunflowers and the Norwegians, where she says she found her real life and her real education. After graduation she wrote for the Lincoln (Neb.) Courier, and in 1896 she came to Pittsburg, where she was for several years on the staff of the Leader, doing clever dramatic and literary criticism in addition to her regular work.
"The Development of an American Novelist" (1915)
The essay that follows is from a small brochure published by Houghton-Mifflin as part of its promotional activities on behalf of Cather's The Song of the Lark. Documentary evidence establishes that Cather herself wrote sections I, II, and VI, and it is apparent that she also worked closely with her editor, Horace Greenslet, on the remaining sections.
WILLA SIBERT CATHER
The Development of an American Novelist
I. A Prairie Childhood
Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from county Tyrone, Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations. When Miss Cather was nine years old her father left Virginia and settled on a ranch in Nebraska, in a thinly populated part of the state where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.
For a child, accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements, talking to the settlers and trying to understand them. The first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a writer than any that came afterward. The change from mountain-sheltered valleys to unprotected plains, the experiences of pioneering, and the contact with people of strange languages and customs impressed her deeply and inspired in her the broad, human understanding so essential to a writer of fiction. Foreign speaking people often talk more freely to a child than to grown persons, and even though they spoke very little English the settlers were social with the lonely little girl and somehow managed to tell her a great many stories about the old country. Miss Cather says:--
"I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than they said-as if I had actually got inside another person's skin. If one begins that early, it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again-no other adventure ever carries one quite so far."
II. Journalism and Editing
After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at nineteen, and immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pittsburgh Leader. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for several years and then gave it up to take the place of the Head of the English Department in the Allegheny High School. While she was teaching she published her first book of verse, "April Twilights," and her first book of short stories, "The Troll Garden."
"The Troll Garden" attracted a good deal of attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906, Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of McClure's Magazine. Two years later she became Managing Editor of McClure's. The duties of this position, the demands of life in New York, and the claims of her new social and business connections occupied her entire attention and for four years she did no writing at all. Then in 1912 she gave up office work and took a house in Cherry Valley, New York.
III. Her First Novel
"Alexander's Bridge," a short novel, was published in 1912. Avoiding alike the Western backgrounds and the newspaper and magazine world, with which she felt she was still too closely connected to "see them from the outside," Miss Cather laid the scene of her story in Boston and London.
Bartley Alexander was a builder of bridges. A man of elemental, restless force, he realized that the success which had made him famous had forced upon him exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape. Confronted by the possibility of a calm, secure middle age, he felt as if he were being buried alive. At this critical period he met again a girl whom he had known in his struggling student days at the Beaux Arts. She was like his youth calling to him. Yet he could respond only through deception and he was not the sort of man who could live two lives.
The situation is treated with subtlety, in a manner both restrained and penetrating. Struggle and tragedy are always near the surface, but there is no hint of sordidness, and Miss Cather has told the story with great artistic skill, brilliant and sympathetic in its reflections of character and life.
IV. "O Pioneers!"
When Miss Cather first began writing, she tried to put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers, who had so profoundly influenced her childhood, into short stories. The results never satisfied her. In explaining her feeling Miss Cather says:--
"It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart, from a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort them and disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I decided that I wouldn't write any more about the country and people for which I had personal feeling.
"Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them and about where my work fell short. She said, ‘Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody's else [sic] way-you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don't let that frighten you. Don't try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants-write the truth and let them take it or leave it.'
"It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett's own work. I dedicated ‘O Pioneers' to her because I had talked over some of the characters with her and in this book I tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word of mouth."
Perhaps it is the simplicity and truthfulness of it which makes "O Pioneers!" stand out preëminently above the sort of novel which we have come to designate as "typically Western." There is a certain sameness about most Western stories. The characters and the country seem stamped into a mechanical similarity with blurred edges and automatic effects. Miss Cather has departed from conventional lines. She took no pattern, but from her own knowledge and love of her subject she wrote with a virility and art that mark her book as a novel of moment. Alexandra, the woman of the story, is forty years old, has brought up her brothers after the death of their parents, and wrested a subsistence from the land by dint of sheer force of will. She is passionately attached to the country. "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love and understand it are the people who own it-for a little while." That is the note struck throughout and wrought with consummate art into the framework of the story. Even the exquisite and tragic episode of the love of Alexandra's brother for the little Bohemian, Marie Shabata, is handled with a ruthlessness in keeping with the country and the stark simplicity of its moral code. Although pure fiction, the vividly sketched background of Nebraska prairies and the faithful character drawing of a class of settlers who are becoming more and more a power in the political and economic life of the country give to "O Pioneers!" a definite historical value.
V. Miss Cather's Latest Novel
In whatever Miss Cather writes the reader may be sure of excellent workmanship and interesting theme. Other than that, one book in no way prepares him for what is coming next.
"The Song of the Lark" is a story of a great American singer, her childhood in the Colorado desert, her early struggles in Chicago, her romantic adventures among the Cliff Dweller ruins in Arizona, her splendid triumphs on the operatic stage.
There is a diverting picture of musical Chicago in the early years of Theodore Thomas's leadership when the young Swedish-American heroine, Thea Kronborg, not yet appreciating the possibilities of her voice, is spending all her money and almost more than all her strength for the sake of her lessons and the drudgery of choir work. There are wonderful chapters on the Cliff Dweller ruins, which first awoke in her the historic imagination so necessary to a great Wagnerian singer and where, away from drudgery for the first time in her life, she grew all at once into a powerful and willful young creature, got her courage, and began to find herself. Thea Kronborg, the Swedes and Mexicans of the little Colorado town where she spent her childhood, the Polish musicians and art-loving German and Jewish capitalists of Chicago and New York-these are to-day as typically American as any descendant of Pilgrim father or southern chevalier.
The author's familiarity with the West has already been accounted for. She is equally intimate with New York, and has gained her knowledge of the ways of the operatic world through journalistic work and through personal friendship with many well-known singers.
VI. Present Life and Future Work
Miss Cather's present home is an apartment in that picturesque and interesting old part of New York known as Greenwich Village. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West. This summer she refused a tempting offer to write a series of articles on the war situation in Europe, preferring instead to explore the twenty-odd miles of Cliff-Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.
What may be Miss Cather's plans for future work she has not disclosed. One thing is certain-she will not repeat herself. There will never be a stereotyped Cather heroine or Cather hero. She finds the appeal of the West compelling, but "Alexander's Bridge" shows how well she knows and loves not only wild nature and the conquering spirit of the new West but also the old, fine culture and traditions of New England.
Few young authors have so broad a field to choose from, and few are so thoroughly equipped for their work. Three books establish her position in the front rank of American writers. "The Song of the Lark," especially, places her definitely in the little group of American novelists that count; the novelists that present American life with full knowledge and convincing reality.
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
(1926)
Cather wrote this sketch for a promotional brochure published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, Willa Cather. A Biographical Sketch, An English Opinion, and An Abridged Bibliography. Cather's typescript is in the Caspersen Collection at Drew University.
Although Willa Cather is generally spoken of as a Western writer, she was born in Virginia, on a farm near Winchester, and lived there until she was eight years old. Her ancestors, on both sides, had been Virginia farmers for three or four generations; they came originally from England, Ireland, and Alsace. When Willa Cather was eight years old, her father took his family to Nebraska and bought a ranch near Red Cloud, a little town on the Burlington Railroad named for the famous Sioux warrior.
Life on a Nebraska ranch, in those days when the country was thinly settled, was full of adventure. Farming was then a secondary matter; the most important occupation was the feeding of great herds of cattle driven up from Texas, and most of the great prairie country from the Missouri River to Denver was still open grazing land. The population of the country about Red Cloud was largely foreign. Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Germans, a few Russians, and to the north the prosperous French Canadian colony of St. Anne.
Willa Cather did not go to school. She had a pony and spent her time riding about the country and getting acquainted with the neighbors, whose foreign speech and customs she found intensely interesting. Had she been born in that community, she doubtless would have taken these things for granted. But she came to this strange mixture of peoples and manners from an old conservative society; from the Valley of Virginia, where the original land grants made in the reigns of George II and George III had been going down from father to son ever since, where life was ordered and settled, where the people in good families were born good, and the poor mountain people were not expected to amount to much. The movement of life was slow there, but the quality of it was rich and kindly. There had been no element of struggle since the Civil War. Foreigners were looked down upon, unless they were English or persons of title.
An imaginative child, taken out of this definitely arranged background, and dropped down among struggling immigrants from all over the world, naturally found something to think about. Struggle appeals to a child more than comfort and picturesqueness, because it is dramatic. No child with a spark of generosity could have kept from throwing herself heart and soul into the fight these people were making to master the language, to master the soil, to hold their land and to get ahead in the world. Those friendships Willa Cather made as a little girl still count immensely for her; and she says she could never find time to be bored in that community where the life of every family was like that of the Swiss Family Robinson. Lightning and hail and prairie fires and drouths and blizzards were always threatening to extinguish this family or that.
All the while that she was racing about over the country by day, Willa Cather was reading at night. She read a good many of the English classics aloud to her two grandmothers. She learned Latin early and read it easily. Later her father moved his family into the little town of Red Cloud, and she went to the high school, but she learned her Latin from an old English gentleman, who had the enthusiasm of the true scholar and with whom she used to read even after she entered the University of Nebraska. She was graduated from that University at nineteen and spent the next few years in Pittsburgh teaching and doing newspaper work. She chose that city to work in rather than New York because she had warm personal friends there. These were the years when she was learning to write, doing all that work and experimenting that every writer and painter must do at some time or other to find and perfect his medium.
But it was only the winters that Miss Cather spent in Pittsburgh. Every summer she went back to Nebraska and Colorado and Wyoming. For although she says it was in these years that she was learning to write, Miss Cather admits that she spent very little time sitting at a desk. She was much too restless for that and too much interested in people, east and west. She believes that there is no use beginning to write until you have lived a good deal, and lived among all kinds of people. But wherever she went, whatever ties she formed, she always went back to the plains country. The first year she spent in Europe she nearly died of homesickness for it. "I hung and hung about the wheat country in central France," she says, "sniffling when I observed a little French girl riding on the box between her father's feet on an American mowing machine, until it occurred to me that maybe if I went home to my own wheat country and my own father, I might be less lachrymose. It's a queer thing about the flat country-it takes hold of you, or it leaves you perfectly cold. A great many people find it dull and monotonous; they like a church steeple, an old mill, a waterfall, country all touched up and furnished, like a German Christmas card. I go everywhere, I admire all kinds of country. I tried to live in France. But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea,-it's the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I've stopped trying. It's incurable."
Miss Cather's first published book was a volume of verse, "April Twilights" (reissued in 1923 as "April Twilights and Later Verse"). While she was in Pittsburgh she had been working from time to time on a collection of short stories. In 1904 she sent the manuscript of this volume of stories, entitled "The Troll Garden," into the publishing house of McClure-Phillips. The manuscript came under the eye of that most discerning of American editors, S. S. McClure, who had already so many discoveries to his credit. He telegraphed Miss Cather to come to New York at once for a conference. He published her book, and published several stories from it in "McClure's Magazine." Two of these, "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "Paul's Case," attracted wide attention, and for several years imitations of them kept turning up in the manuscript bags of New York editors.
Two years after he accepted her book of short stories, S. S. McClure offered Miss Cather a position on his magazine. She joined the McClure staff in the winter of 1906. Two years later she became managing editor of McClure's and held that position for four years. During that period of editorial work she wrote very little. She traveled a great deal, in Europe and in the American Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico. In 1912 she gave up editorial work and wrote her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge." This was followed by "O Pioneers!" "The Song of the Lark" and "My Antonia," "Youth and the Bright Medusa," "One of Ours," "A Lost Lady," "The Professor's House," and "My Mortal Enemy." Nearly all of these books have been translated into various European languages, and Willa Cather has a rapidly growing European reputation.
Interview at Grand Central Station (1926)
This brief interview first appeared in the Nebraska State Journal on September 5, 1926, and was reprinted in 1986 as an actual interview in L. Brent Bohlke's valuable Willa Cather in Person (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). A typescript in Drew University's Caspersen Collection now shows that the "interview" is in fact a fiction composed entirely by Cather herself. An appended note, written in pencil and not by Cather, suggests that Cather composed the interview to help promote her forthcoming novel, My Mortal Enemy, though it was apparently never used for this purpose.
[Untitled]
Interviewed at the Grand Central Station where she was waiting for a train one hot July day, Willa Cather said:
"Yes, I'm going out of town, - it's rather evident. No, not West this time. I have just come back from three months in New Mexico. Now I'm going up into New England."
"What part of New England?"
"Oh, several places! Mr. Knopf and Mr. Reynolds will always have my address, if you should wish to reach me about something important. Seriously, I'm going away to work and don't want to be bothered."
"But this is vacation time."
"I've just had a long vacation in New Mexico. I need a rest from resting."
"Are you beginning a new novel?"
"No, I'm in the middle of one."
"When will it be published?"
"The book? About a year from now. The serial publication will begin sometime this winter. I want to finish the manuscript by the middle of February and get abroad in the early spring."
"I suppose, Miss Cather, it's no use to ask you for the title. You told me several years ago that you never announced the title of a new book until it was completed."
"Did I tell you that? Well, this time I'll make an exception. I don't like to get into a rut about anything. I call this book ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop'."
"And the scene?"
"Oh, that remains to be seen! My train is called."
"One general question on the way down, please. What do you consider the greatest obstacle American writers have to overcome?"
"Well, what do other writers tell you?"
"Some say commercialism, and some say Prohibition."
"I don't exactly agree with either. I should say it was the lecture-bug. In this country a writer has to hide and lie and almost steal in order to get time to work, - and peace of mind to work with. Besides, lecturing is very dangerous for writers. If we lecture, we get a little more owlish and self-satisfied all the time. We hate it at first, if we are decently modest, but in the end we fall in love with the sound of our own voice. There is something insidious about it, destructive to ones [sic] finer feelings. All human beings, apparently, like to speak in public. The timid man becomes bold, the man who has never had an opinion about anything becomes chock full of them the monent [sic] he faces an audience. A woman, alas, becomes even fuller! Really, I've seen people's reality quite destroyed by the habit of putting on a rostrum front. It's especially destructive to writers, ever so much worse than alcohol, takes their edge off."
"But why, why?"
"Certainly, I can't tell you now. He's calling ‘all aboard'. Try it out yourself; go lecture to a Sunday School or a class of helpless infants somewhere, and you'll see how puffed-up and important you begin to feel. You'll want to do it right over again. But don't! Goodbye."
Appended note, handwritten, by someone other than Willa Cather:
Miss Cather's most recent published work is "the [sic] Professor's House", which turned out to be a national bestseller. Mr. Knopf, her publisher, announces a short novel, "My Mortal Enemy" by Miss Cather, for October.
Excerpts from three dust-jacket blurbs:
Evidence that Cather herself wrote the portions excerpted from the first two jackets below is internal; for Sapphira and the Slave Girl jacket, we have the actual typescript, which shows that Cather reviewed and revised the first paragraph carefully (as she did the last, not included here) and herself completely rewrote the long second paragraph about the novel itself and its author.
Excerpt from first-edition dust-jacket for Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920):
Willa Cather wrote her first short story some fifteen years ago. It was published in McClures [sic], having been accepted by correspondence with the author, who was in the West. She was also asked to come east as a member of the magazine's staff. For several years she devoted herself to editorial work in New York and abroad. It was in Italy curiously enough, that she wrote her first story about the prairie country of the West, where she spent her childhood, and which has since become so much her field. The next summer, which she spent in London on magazine business, found an echo in her first novel, "Alexandra's [sic!] Bridge," published in 1912.
Excerpt from 1932 dust-jacket for Song of the Lark:
Thea Kronborg is sublimely egotistic and every influence, natural and human, she turns into account to help her in her career. There is always the struggle between the human and the artistic in the woman herself.
Excerpt from first-edition dust-jacket for Sapphira and the Slave Girl:
For some time past it has been known that Miss Cather was at work on a new novel, but the setting remained, until very recently, her own well-kept secret. For Sapphira and the Slave Girl she has gone to Virginia-just west of Winchester, where she lived as a little girl before the family moved to Nebraska.
The chief theme of the novel is the subtle persecution of a beautiful mulatto girl by her jealous mistress. The unconventional opening chapter at the breakfast table strikes the keynote of the whole story, in which strong feelings and bitter wrongs are hidden under the warm atmosphere of good manners and domestic comfort. The period is 1856, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The setting is the beautiful Virginia countryside, and the narrative is peopled with unusual characters: the mountain people, grim disapproving "Republicans," and Sapphira's African slaves, who are, and doubtless were meant to be, the most interesting figures in the book. These colored folk are presented in an unusual way. They are attractive to the writer as individuals, and are presented by a sympathetic artist who is neither reformer nor sentimentalist.
 About the Contributor:
David Porter is the Tisch Family Distinguished Professor at Skidmore College, where he teaches in the classics, English, and music departments. Porter previously taught at Carleton College, Princeton University, Williams College, and Indiana University, and was president of Carleton and Skidmore Colleges. He is the author of books on Horace, Greek tragedy, and Virginia Woolf, and co-editor of a book on pianist Edward Steuermann, with whom he studied for seven years. His book On the Divide: The Many Lives of Willa Cather, was published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press.
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