LETTER: Typed letter signed, to Tom Boyd, on writers and the writing process.
CATHER ON WRITING TO A NOVELIST AND EDITOR — UNPUBLISHED, UNKNOWN
Cather, Willa. Typed letter signed to Tom Boyd, February 21, no year; one leaf, one page.
An unpublished – indeed, unknown – letter by Cather to novelist, editor, and bookseller Thomas Boyd, on
the writing process.
Cather fills an 8 1⁄2 x 11 leaf with colorful commentary on the writing life. In part:
...I am interested in your literary supplement. But I wonder if you known how many demands there are on a poor writer’s time, and how perplexing some of them are? One has, in common decency, for instance, to answer the letters of nice old ladies who ask foolish questions before one replys [sic] to those of hustling young newspaper men whose friendliness might be of pecuniary value to one.
Can’t you see that that very fact makes them come last? Publicity has got to be such a brazen game these days, one has much ado to keep one’s self respect, anyhow. You’ll admit it would be much less cheap to go out and shout about a new hair oil or a tooth paste than about one’s own books.
She addresses Boyd’s editorial, “A Revaluation,” elucidating her views on why “a writer of imaginative literature must not be literal;
he must be able to be literal, he must know everything he touches well enough for that. But if he is n artist he will not be literal, because no artist can be. If he has the proper equipment to be a writer of fiction at all, he will never have to puzzle as to how far he should be literal; he has a selective machine in his brain that decides all that for him. If he has not [crossed out] such an instrument, he had better choose another profession.
She devotes her lengthy concluding paragraph to the craft of writing, an author’s use of detail, and the novelist’s memory; in part:
If he has the right kind of memory, -- and the novelist’s memory is quite as special a thing as the musicians – he will remember only the details of any event which contributed to the major impression the event made upon him. The writer does not “efface” himself, as you say; he loses himself in the amplitude of his impressions, and in the exciting business of finding all his memories, long-forgotten scenes and faces, running off his pen, as if they were in the ink, and not in his brain at all. If he is an artist worth the name, what he remembers is right, what he has forgotten was superficial, accidental, and is netter forgotten.
Letters by Cather are scarce: she expressed a wish that all her letters be destroyed upon her death, a wish to which far too many recipients acceded.
Provenance: by descent to the grandson of recipient, the novelist Tom Boyd who died in 1935
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