The Cather Correspondence

Willa Cather did not want her letters to be published. She wanted her carefully disciplined works of fiction to speak for themselves. Since her death in 1947, scholars have generally feared to disobey the wishes she expressed in her will, where she adjured those in charge of her literary estate not to allow “the publication in any form whatsoever, of the whole, or any part of any letter or letters written by me” (Last will 5). Now the trust that controls her copyrights has permitted publication of 566 letters, about one-fifth of the number known to exist. The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), prepared by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, is attractively presented and intelligently though not profusely annotated. Jewell and Stout have heroically refused to publish any letters in excerpted form. No apparently mundane or irrelevant parts are omitted; all of Cather’s words appear in their original associations.

Once it was clear that publication might take place, there could be no question of delay until a complete edition was prepared; people had already waited more than six decades to see anything at all. But the publisher obviously wanted to provide as large a selection of letters as might be sold to a wide audience. The resulting edition will not, of course, be fully satisfying to any group of readers. It is too long to give casually interested persons an introduction to Cather’s life, and too short to allow critics and historians to be sure about any generalizations they may base on it. The conclusions I am about to offer will remain hypotheses until all of Cather’s letters are made available in full, and that may take a long time. I am informed that the editors “have been encouraged by many readers to pursue an edition of Cather’s complete correspondence and they are beginning to plan for such a possibility” (Jewell).

While waiting, one hopes they will have more to say than they have said so far about the issues, ethical and editorial, involved in their enterprise.¹ But if any admirers of Cather have a guilty conscience about reading what she tried to keep away from them, they will soon discover how unfortunate it was that she tried to manage her reputation so closely. The letters contain no ugly secrets, no revelations of personal or literary cynicism. In literature as in life, Cather appears to have been the soul of honor. Yet as long as her wishes kept the letters from reproduction, her voice was distorted by paraphrases and summaries that scholars produced and, naturally, quarreled about. Now we hear Cather herself; we see how she develops her meanings; we find where she herself puts the emphasis. It’s like finding the manuscript of a Greek play, hitherto known only by description—or better, like discovering a film of its first performance.

In this case, however, the chief performer is an exceptionally wily one. Cather has no intention of answering the big questions about her life—not straightforwardly, at least. She doesn’t consider it her job to satisfy anyone’s curiosity; her job is to maintain her privacy and integrity, while still expressing herself as forcefully as she can. She isn’t taciturn; she isn’t sly; she isn’t an intriguer or selfcomplimenter, and she seldom lies: her editors identify only a handful of attempts to deceive. But she is not about to explain herself. She leaves explanations for the reader to construct. As she says about her fiction, she doesn’t mind leaving people with something to “puzzle over” (461). In each letter, as in the collection as a whole, she is definite; she is concrete; she clearly answers whichever questions she decides to answer. Yet she is not going to say all that she thinks, about anything.

This is strikingly true about issues of gender and sexuality. Beginning in the 1980s, gender and transgression of gender became leading topics of Cather studies. Critics invested heavily in Cather’s lesbianism, in its influence on her...