"Important, Responsible Work": Willa Cather's Office Stories and her Necessary Editorial Career

"IMPORTANT, RESPONSIBLE WORK": WILLA CATHER'S OFFICE STORIES AND HER NECESSARY EDITORIAL CAREER Ellen Gruber Garvey New Jersey City University In December 1908 Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a much-quoted letter to Willa Cather, inwhich she urged the youngerwomanto leave her"incessant , important, responsible work" as an editor at McClure'smagazine to devote herself to her own writing.1 Cather scholars and fans like this letter, since leaving McClure sfreed Cather to concentrate on her fiction. But Cather's career in a powerful position in the premier mass medium of her age was transformative. The office was still a new space for women and "going to business" was still a new activity for them. Magazine publishing had considerable attractions for educated women ofCather's period . Cather's work supplied herwith income and contacts, and it shaped herwriting. Much scholarship on Cather looks at her editorial work as at best a necessary preamble to various aspects ofher life. Editing got Cather out ofNebraska to work on the HomeMonthlyin Pittsburgh, and thereby introduced her to Isabella McClung, and through her, to contacts and a sense of herself as a serious writer; editing got Cather to New York to work on McClure's, and so introduced her to the New York literary scene and Edith Lewis; editing sent Cather to Boston on a project to conduct research on Mary Baker Eddy for McClure'sand thereby introduced herto Sarah Orne Jewett andAnnie Fields; editing eventuallygave Cather enough distance from Nebraska to write about it. Finally, however , most scholars see Cather's editorial work on McClure's as a distraction and a misdirection ofenergies. Undergirdingthat critical consensus are Cather's own anguished complaints , in correspondence with other writers, about how draining editorial work was for her. She responded in this vein, for example, to a 1908 letterfrom Jewetturgingthat she leave editorialworkbehind. We might note, however, that Jewett's December letter follows two in which Jewett laments her own preoccupation and lackofstrength orconcentration for writing. Jewett and Cather did not meet until afterJewett's carriage accident made manyactivities exhaustingforher, essentially stoppingJewett's writing. Her letter to Cather stems in part from her own sense ofbeing daunted by the effort ofwriting. Jewett's shifting pronouns reveal that she identifies with Cather; her wishes for Cather are tied to her wishes for 178Ellen Gruber Garvey herself. She writes, "I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should—when one's first working powerhas spent itselfnothing everbrings it backjust the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force ofthis veryyear could have gone into three or four stories."2 Jewett goes on to endorse a Romantic notion ofgenius recollecting in tranquility, writing in seclusion, and finding a stillness from which to write. "To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlookupon the world." It is a seductive image ofwhat the writer needs, endorsed by critics who have traced the route ofCather's settling in to the room ofher own on a high floor at Isabelle McClung's family home, sitting in seclusion looking out at the world, or to the tent of her own in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she summered. But it is not the whole truth. Cather responds to the portion of Jewett's letter that envisions the office as a lair of dangers and distractions, keeping her from her true calling. Her reply plays to that vision with dramatic panache, in a torrent of metaphors. She compares the energy she puts out during the day at McClure'sto that ofa trapeze performer, worried about an imminent fall; she reports that the work dilutes and weakens her and that reading manuscripts is like sitting in a tepid bath and leaves her irritatedwith eitherheat or cold. She is "dispossessed and bereft" of herself; her mind becomes a card catalog ofnotes with only the most limited application. The work of editingthe magazine itselfis like mentalarithmetic, the interestingpeople she meets are seen from a distance, as from a train; the excitement...