Cather Studies, Volume 6: History, Memory, and War

Wartime Fictions: Willa Cather, the Armed Services Editions, and the Unspeakable Second World War

Wartime Fictions Willa Cather, the Armed Services Editions, and the Unspeakable Second World War M A R Y C H I N E R Y In a 1945 article, The Saturday Evening Post reported on wartime efforts to support the troops’ morale through reading. In one anecdote, a soldier, lightly wounded in the Philippines and awaiting medical rescue, reached into his knapsack and pulled out a book issued to him by the Armed Services, which he read until help arrived: ‘‘Huddled in a muddy foxhole on Leyte with a hole in his ankle, Corp. Erwin Rorick spent the hours before help came reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. He had grabbed it the day before under the delusion that it was a murder mystery, but he discovered, to his amazement, that he liked it anyway ’’ (Wittels11). Rorick was not alone in being introduced to fiction he would not normally have read. The U.S. government had begun a massive effort to provide reading to the troops in every part of the war theater. As her part of the war effort, Cather agreed to republish some of her works in a highly unusual set of circumstances . One publication was through her old acquaintance Alexander Woollcott, and the other was through the Council on Books in Wartime. As early as 1939, Cather had understood the gathering gloom in Europe. In The Writer and Her World, Janis P. Stout notes, ‘‘In March 1939, over a year before she completed Sapphira, she told Dorothy Canfield Fisher that having suffered the hardest year of her life, she found consolation in the one activity that could carry her through. She had abandoned the book, she said, but had taken 285 286 m a ry c h i n e ry it up again in response to the unspeakableness of another war because the routine of writing provided respite from bad news’’ (291). In particular, Hitler’s march in Europe and France’s unsuccessful efforts to resist Nazism contributed to an overwhelming sense of loss. James Woodress explains that ‘‘Cather’s despair over the fall of France in June [1940] had been followed by the horrendous Battle of Britain, which began in the summer and continued while she was awaiting’’ the publication of Sapphira and the Slave Girl (491). However, Cather’s respites were temporary, for in no way did she retreat from the world or the war. Indeed, Cather followed the war closely and in letters specifies battles and key figures . Woodress writes that ‘‘Churchill became her hero’’ and that she felt he was far more prescient about the threat of Hitler than the United States (491). Cather was also worried about her family members who were either fighting in the war or married to someone who was. In one letter, she sent Sigrid Undset an article about a Red Cloud pilot who shot down Japanese planes (Harbison 246). Cather feared the worst: that civilization as she knew it would be forever changed. Edith Lewis later wrote, ‘‘Many people thought she was ‘not interested’ in the war; but, indeed, she felt it too much to make it the subject of casual conversation.’’ In 1940, ‘‘when the French army surrendered, she wrote in her ‘Line-a-day,’ ‘There seems to be no future at all for people of my generation’’’ (Lewis 184). Cather continued this nearly apocalyptic tone in a 1943 New Year’s greeting to her friend Alexander Woollcott,1 in which she wonders why Earth was not left as empty as the rest of the universe. Woollcott was not a particularly intimate friend, so her confidence to him seems surprising. Yet it was through this New York City acquaintance that Cather made her first contribution to the war effort. Alexander Woollcott, member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, former drama editor of the New York Times, and columnist for the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs, was a powerful bon vivant in the New York theater scene. Although it is not certain how Cather and Woollcott met, they certainly attended theater and arts events during the same years. Woollcott was hard to miss in his early career as a theater critic, for he ‘‘swept’’ into front row seats in a black cape and cane (Kaufman and Hennessey xi). In the 287 Wartime Fictions 1930s, he retired to Vermont, where he held...