Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

8. It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It Profit and Prestige Shared by Cather and Her Literary Agent

158 8 It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It Profit and Prestige Shared by Cather and Her Literary Agent M AT T H E W L AV I N In the introduction to My Ántonia (1918), a fictionalized author, ostensibly an unnamed version of Cather herself, tells a story of soliciting and receiving a manuscript from her childhood friend Jim Burden, adding, “the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me” (xiii). This frame introduction situates Burden as the narrator of the novel, sets up the story’s autobiographical mode, and establishes an unreliable narrator whose presence arguably inaugurates the experimental or modernist phase of Cather’s career.1 Notably, the introduction also depicts an established author passing an enthusiastic amateur’s manuscript to the public with an endorsement of its authenticity and importance.2 This exchange is also a useful point of entry for an analysis of what Aaron Jaffe identi fies as “the complex economies of cultural prestige” and “secondary literary labor” fundamental to the U.S. literary marketplace in the early twentieth century (3). The unnamed author of My Ántonia’s introduction acts as an agent or mediator, passing Burden’s work to the public with a brief word of context and an implicit endorsement of its content. Cather’s depiction of a private literary exchange at the outset of My Ántonia speaks to her awareness of how a range of per- 159 It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It sonal, professional, and managerial figures mediated literary careers . Cather advocated powerfully for herself but also benefited from the support of several literary intermediaries, including but not limited to her domestic partner and collaborator Edith Lewis, her former employer S. S. McClure, and her agent Paul Revere Reynolds. Of these figures, Reynolds has probably received the least attention. He did not introduce Cather to the public, nor did he participate in the early crafting of her literary persona, yet his involvement in her career speaks to Cather’s engagement with the issues of literary identity and credibility raised by scholars such as Jaffe. Reynolds took Cather on as a client once she had established herself, and he placed many of her short stories and novels in magazines from 1916 through the 1920s.3 During this period, Cather also triangulated her decisions with Alfred and Blanche Knopf (president and vice-president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., respectively) and made individual efforts to sell her work.4 Although some have framed Cather as the reluctant artist and Reynolds as the aggressive salesman, her relationship with the market as mediated by Reynolds was more complex than such a dichotomy suggests. In an essay published in 2000, Rebecca Roorda moves past the stereotype of Reynolds as “merely being an employee or a manuscript peddler” (72), providing detailed profiles of the magazines Cather published with and considering their significance to her career. Roorda also argues that “the inconsistencies of her magazine publications would seem to be a direct reflection of her ambivalence about the changing trends in what was becoming the writing business” (75). My analysis of Reynolds builds on Roorda’s, providing a broader historical and theoretical context to emphasize the connection between Reynolds’s work and the driving principles of the modern literary marketplace. Rather than viewing Cather as a figure “caught in the middle and pulled in opposite directions” by artistic and monetary concerns (Roorda 75), I document an association that was limited but mutually beneficial, with Cather and Reynolds consistently seeking a balance between profit and 160 matthew lavin prestige. While their efforts sometimes seem adversarial, Cather made careful use of Reynolds’s skills and crafted a convincing anti-commercial posture as a component of her strategic selffashioning . Reynolds, in turn, developed a diverse client base: his most artistically credible authors ensured his cultural legitimacy in the eyes of editors, publishers, and clients, while his most commercially marketable authors allowed him to maximize his income. I am less concerned with Cather’s status as a literary modernist than with the distinctly modern cultural factors that enabled a diversity of literary communities and texts. Modernism is often defined by its most distinct stylistic or aesthetic features, especially experimental forms that did not conform to preexisting ideas of texts as commodities.5 As Catherine Turner argues, modernism is defined by more than stylistic experimentation. Instead...