Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters

Abstract

Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's LettersThis review essay explores the profound scholarly significance of the publication of Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a nearly 700-page collection scrupulously edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (Knopf, 2013). volume contains 566 full-text transcriptions selected from the 3,000 Cather letters now known to exist and makes them accessible in print for the first time. Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade not only publication of her letters but even direct quotation from them, so biographers and critics for decades engaged in a kind of shadowboxing as they sought to convey Cather's thoughts and feelings through the awkward constraint of paraphrase. Now that the testamentary restrictions have been lifted and this volume is available, scholars and fans can hear Cather's epistolary voice without traveling to archives. An extraordinary contribution to Cather studies, the Selected Letters offers much to anyone interested in twentieth-century American literature, women writers, or LGBT/queer studies.Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters THE SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLA CATHER. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. xix + 715 pp. $37.50.Novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) was fond of quoting a line from the French historian Jules Michelet: The end is nothing; the road is all (Not Under Forty 99). In the latter days of the 1980s, as a graduate student, I spent a lot of time on the road in an unreliable car with Cather on my mind as I traveled from one archive to another reading the author's letters. I did so because that was the only way to access them. There was no published collection of the letters of one of the twentieth century's foremost writers because Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade any publication of her letters. will went further, even prohibiting direct quotation from the documents. And so I, like generations of scholars before me, dutifully made my way around the country to hold often-fragile missives in my hands and frantically scribble down notes and transcriptions on legal pads that are now themselves growing fragile from age and the moisture in my basement study. That is what archival research was like before laptops and portable scanners, and that was part of the cost, to scholars, of Willa Cather's will.My project was not fundamentally biographical, but I did not feel I should rely on the paraphrases of others, particularly of letters that spoke in some way to Cather's relationship to the sex and gender norms of the late nineteenth century. Those issues were central to my dissertation and the book that grew out of it (Lindemann), and they were highly contentious ones in Cather studies at the time. I needed to know exactly what she said when she wrote to her college crush Louise Pound about how she felt about the prospect of being apart from Louise during the summers of 1892 and 1893. A proximate sense would be insufficient, and so I logged many hundreds of miles in an ugly gray compact that had a weird and unfixable habit of stalling out in summer storms. I like to think Cather would have been impressed with my intrepid pursuit of the truth, put out as she might have been with my focus on her love life. As a writer who produced stories rooted in actual people, places, and events, she herself logged many thousands of miles, by train, by car, and even on horseback, in the interest of research.I offer this anecdote of old-school archival research as a way of underscoring and celebrating the profound scholarly significance of the publication, at long last, of Selected Letters of Willa Cather. One hesitates to use the word monumental, but such praise in this instance is doubly warranted. That term accurately describes both the book's size (it is just over 700 pages long) and the difference it will make to a field long hobbled by the lack of such a volume. …