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Edith Lewis Living Struct Lewis to Do) Copyright © 1989 by the Willa Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memorial and Educational Foundation Fall, 1989 Special Literary Issue Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsle VOLUME XXXIII, No.3 Guest Editor, Ronald W. Butler RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA ately, that in Willa Cather Living EDITOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this special literary edition of the Lewis had without acknowledg- WCPM Newsletter has been done as a tribute to the ongoing work of ment used some of t he remarks Mildred R. Bennett, who for forty years has been the backbone of Willa about Cather and her fiction he Cather studies, in celebration of her eightieth birthday, September 8, had made in letters to her and to 1989. Cather m the latter he requested Lewis return to him (as Cather had promised him she would in- Edith Lewis Living struct Lewis to do). Although Lewis assured Tennant that his By PATRICIA L. YONGUE letters were tied up in neat University of Houston, Houston, Texas bundles in Cather’s secretary At her own request, Edith their forty-year life together and just as Cather had left them, and Lewis’s gravestone near the foot Cather’s naming of Lewis as her she would do what Tennant of Willa Cather’s, in the old, se- executor, literary trustee, and an asked (1947 fragment), she told questered Jaffrey Cemetery, is heir make axiomatic a desire to him later (May 23, ?1948) that small m much smaller than Ca- share a visible eternity with she could not destroy his letters ther’s -- and was, until recently, Lewis, or whether Lewis alone and that Miss Bloom (Cather’s unmarked. It was Lewis who had insisted on that intimacy is a private secretary) would send worked so diligently in 1947 to very speculative matter. them to him in the event Lewis secure that location for her Lewis’s proposal to lie in should "get killed." Tennant, friend, perhaps already antici- death as she had apparently however, never received his let- pating it for herself, in the face lived, anonymously, in the ters. Lewis also wrote (May 23, of word that the little cemetery shadow of Willa Cather, sug- ?1948) that she had never read was already full. Tennant’s letters to Cather ex- gests that she perceived herself cept one that Cather showed We still do not know officially -- and wanted us to perceive her her, but that Cather had quoted whether Cather wanted to be -- as one with Cather, a part of frequently from them, such was buried in Jaffrey~ although it is her greatness. Forty years of her regard for the brilliant young very likely that she did, and we serving Cather, of freeing her aristocrat. And Lewis passion- have no idea if she wanted to be from duties and loneliness that ately gilded the lily several times buried with Edith Lewis. Lewis would have impinged on her pro- (as Tennant’s correspondents, wrote to Cather’s British friend fessional life and leisure, and thirty years of devotional pro- myself included, tended to do), Stephen Tennant (fragment of a not the least of which was when 1947 letter) that Cather had once tection and control of Cather’s she told the delighted Stephen told her and one of her nieces affairs might entitle Edith Lewis that Cather spoke of him as she that she wished to be buried to such a view. And in the spirit of unity it seems she had indeed had spoken of no other of her there. Cather loved Jaffrey; she friends. found there solitude and a com- forged for herself a version of forting and peaceful place to Cather’s own chosen epitaph, a Marilyn Arnold, in her intro- write; and she often invited her line from My Antonia: "That is duction to the new edition of friends to visit her there. Most of happiness; to be dissolved into Willa Cather Living, argues the the time, though, she went with- something complete and great."’ likelihood that Edith Lewis did out Edith Lewis. In fact, as far as This final act, however, may examine the correspondence we can tell, Lewis only once ac- have been the consummation of Cather did not destroy, bor- companied Cather to Jaffrey -- a series of such acts which belie rowed from it, and then herself to read proofs, one of the major conflicting motives. Stephen destroyed the letters. It happens services she performed for Ca- Tennant, to whom Edith Lewis that Lewis’s stalling assurances ther from the beginning of their became early attached after Ca- to Stephen Tennant of the safety relationship. Whether, then, ther’s death, told me, affection- of his letters coincided with her Page 12 efforts to get Alfred Knopf to nant’s arguments in behalf of a prise. After every session with see it her way with respect to a biography moved her at once to Brown, Lewis wrote, she felt that much "dreaded" biography of write Alfred Knopf and tell him she had betrayed Willa Cather Cather and with her invention of to go ahead with the plan. She by allowing any biography to be a Cather in Willa Cather Living. sounds very confiding, but she written at all. Cather depended My own sense, similar to Marilyn is quite circumspect about re- mightily on her friends to pro- Arnold’s, has always been that vealing to Stephen just exactly tect her, to keep "the cheap and she was using Tennant’s letters what her negotiations with the vulgar and the merely curi- to help her frame and express Knopf had been. In her first let- ous" people away from her. She certain thoughts about Cather ter to Stephen (September 5, needed the security of knowing which she may, after so long a ?1947), who was persistent in her friends were loyal (June 3, silence, and given her propen- his inquiries about a biography, ?1948 or 1949). But, Lewis con- sity toward self-effacement, she acts as if she and Knopf cluded, Brown’s Life would be have already felt incapable of were of a mind about finding the the ultimate protection against voicing on her own. In the 1947 right person to take on the task. the world, if it were properly writ- fragment, she even told Tennant Tennant may have briefly,enter- ten. that the loving way he wrote tained the idea of doing it him- In the first place, the biog- about Cather echoed her own self, but Lewis, despite her con- raphy was not to be an amassing thoughts. In 1948, apparently in tinuing paean to Stephen’s thor- of detail. It was to be a very response tohis declaration that ough understanding of Cather definite portrait of a very definite Lucy Gayheart was a wonderful, and of the sort of biography that artist. Detail was to be used as sensitive novel, she said that needed to be written, never sug- Cather herself used it, selective- she had just been re-reading gested that he apply for the job. ly, to capture the essential, not Lucy the winter prior to Cather’s E. K. Brown had, according to accidental realities of life. To death and had told Cather that Lewis, always been the strong- this end, Lewis compiled (in she (Lewis) had been too hard on est candidate; from her point of increments) a set of notes for it earlier. view, he was the most trust- Brown which would contain all Plagiarism, however, is by no worthy, the one who would do the material she would allow means the issue here. Nor is ex- the job as she would have published and which she re- ploitation. Appropriation of wanted it done. Willa Cather had garded as pertinent to the life of Willa Cather and the desire -- liked Brown’s Yale Review essay an artist. She said that she also the utter need -- to possess and on her fiction, Lewis said, and copied for him a set of notes she control her is. she herself had just read a pre- had made from Tennant’s letters Perhaps the need to assert release copy of Brown’s study of to her that Brown found both herself and to govern in a way Matthew Arnold and was im- stimulating and useful. How she could not while the very pressed by his handling of form seriously Brown, or Leon Edel, dominant Willa Cather was alive and his intellectual integrity. He who finished the biography, is embodied in Edith Lewis’s at- seemed a man likely to distrust took this latter material has tempt to supervise the first feeling as a guide to writing a gone unremarked. biography~ of Willa Cather. biography. In the February 3, Lewis’s sustained worry over ?1948 letter to Stephen Tennant, Lewis’s surviving letters to the biography begins to take the Stephen T.ennant from 1947 she said she wished she could get someone like Sidney Colvin, form ofa complaint that, I think, through 1952 provide a sus- registers an ambivalence, if an tained, if incomplete, narrative the Keats biographer, to write of her project. It was, for a long Cather’s life; so many other unconscious one, about Willa biographers were more in- Cather -- an ambivalence not time, her obsession. surprising in one who, even Lewis and Alfred .Knopf, Ca- terested in promoting their own brilliance over that of their sub- voluntarily, has made one’s life a ther’s publisher after 1920, had service to another. On June 20, been conferring over the possi- ject. Lewis wrote Tennant (April bility of doing a biography 3, ?1948) that his own appraisal 1952, Lewis wrote to Tennant of Brown’s essay on Cather that she had been working with (February 3, ?1948), a venture solidified her decision to go Leon Edel on his completion of Lewis feared, particularly, we suspect, because she was not with Brown.
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