LETTERS: Four Autograph letters and a card to WSC from Isabelle McClung.
FROM ISABELLE MCCLUNG
Cather, Willa. Four Autograph Letters Signed and one card from Isabelle McClung, ca. 1933; 6 leaves; 1 card, 9 ½ x 7”, black and white. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Letters from Cather’s close friend and former lover Isabelle McClung, addressed to “Darling Willa” and “My dearest Willy” (in her youth Cather often dressed as a boy and referred to herself as “William” or “Willy”) and affectionately signed, “So lovingly.” A rare find: after Isabelle’s 1938 death, Cather retrieved her letters from the McClung family and burned them, making these letters are one of the few bits of surviving evidence of the abiding feelings Cather and McClung shared for each other in the years following their parting. McClung animatedly discusses life, literature and travel; gossips about mutual friends, and reminisces on her and Cather’s past. A few representative examples will give the character of the series:
“I write to you not because I have anything to say, only because my thoughts are of you and the other night I dreamed that you were very—yes, very cross with me and that goes on troubling me though I am no ‘believer in dreams.’”
[Ivan Turgenov’s novella] “’The Diary of a Superfluous Man’” always sinks me to the depths—I do not like it—but—what any one must feel to write like that—that is what is so hard to bear.”
“I do not understand how, with all that foolish moralizing, L.M.A. [Louisa May Alcott] could maker her people so real—they are realer to me than most of the people I know are.”
“Paris is worse that Pittsburgh. P. was at least colorful in a violent, ugly way, while Paris is a mess—a negative mess.”
“[T]he smell of the box was strong—that always takes me straight to Willowshall and the little square bit of ground behind your great grand parent’s house—that was where I first got it’s [sic] real smell.”
Willa (née Wilella) Cather was born to a poor Back Creek, Virginia family in 1873, the oldest of seven children. When she was nine her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she encountered the environment and immigrants who would later populate her fictions. An ambitious and independent young woman, Cather attended the University of Nebraska where she majored in Classic Languages. She soon set her sights on a career in journalism, publishing her first work in the college newspaper and moving to Pittsburgh in 1895 to manage and edit the Home Monthly—to which she frequently contributed pseudonymously—and in 1897, as a copy editor, music and theatre critic for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader. In 1901, during a hiatus from periodical work, she taught high school. During this period she met Isabelle McClung, who would be a lifelong friend and patron. They immediately became inseparable; after graduation, in a highly unorthodox arrangement, McClung invited Cather to live with her, and to travel with her, and provided her a study in which she wrote her first published volumes: April Twilights (1903), a collection of verse, now scarce, and The Troll Garden, her 1905 collection of short stories.
The great love of Willa Cather's life was for a woman, Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh judge. Cather spent five years living in the McClung household, sharing a bedroom with Isabelle while working in Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and high school teacher. But she and Isabelle McClung could not spend their lives together. Samuel McClung would not allow it, and his daughter depended on his money. When the 32-year-old Cather moved to New York in 1906 to work for the lively and important McClure's Magazine (she eventually became its managing editor), Isabelle McClung did not go with her. Two years later, Cather began sharing an apartment in New York with Edith Lewis, who also worked in publishing, and the two women lived and traveled together until Cather's death in 1947. (Rose, Phyllis. “The Point of View was Masculine.” New York Times, September 11, 1983.)
However, even after Cather was living with another woman and McClung married violinist Jan Hambourg in 1916, the two remained close. Sharon O’Brien, a leading contemporary biographer of Cather, writes that McClung played the role of “lover, mother, patron, and muse” in Cather’s life for almost forty years; she believes that McClung was “the one person for whom all [Cather’s] books had been written.”
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