REVIEW Volume 60 z No. 2 Winter 2017 Willa Cather REVIEW Volume 60 z No. 2 | Winter 2017 Welcome to the Willa Cather Review. Starting out in 1957 as a mimeographed newsletter, this publication has changed over the years—and as its new title shows, it has changed again. When scholarly essays and commentary became more regular in these pages, we added Review to the title. With News from Catherland now the Cather Foundation’s newsletter, we have decided to become the Willa Cather Review. Peer-reviewed, MLA indexed, frequently cited, the Review seeks to publish members’ best work. Do be in touch, do submit. Let us hear from you. 2 11 16 23 CONTENTS 1 Letters from the Executive Director and the President 16 A Thing to be Discarded: Culinary Appropriation and Displacement in My Ántonia z Stephanie Tsank 2 Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence Melissa J. Homestead 23 From the Art Collection 11 The New National Willa Cather Center On the Cover “. I’m trying to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part. Just as if I put here on the table a green vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which neither of them will produce alone. Why should I try to say anything clever, or by any colorful rhetoric detract attention from those two objects, the relation they have to each other and the effect they have upon each other? . I’d like the writing to be so lost in the object, that it doesn’t exist for the reader. .” —Willa Cather interviewed in the Bookman, May 3, 1921 Painting by Laura Katz Letter from tours and arts programming for an unforgettable event; a the Executive Director contemporary adaptation of Cather’s O Pioneers! was staged at Ashley Olson our Opera House; and many photos, letters, and other objects were added to our collection. Demonstrative of Cather’s worldwide appeal, we were pleased to host visitors from more As the year draws to a close, a deep feeling of gratitude has than forty states in the U.S., as well as Nepal, Spain, the United come over me. I’m writing this letter around Thanksgiving Kingdom, and Vietnam. and you’ll likely be reading it around holiday time. During this We have a lot to be grateful for. First and foremost to Cather season of counting one’s blessings, giving gifts and supporting herself, whose work continues to enlighten and inspire us all. To causes, I want to express my deepest thanks to our members our founder Mildred Bennett, who alongside our early board near and far. members and volunteers had the foresight to assemble and Because of your steadfast support, 2017 was a pivotal year preserve collections and historic sites associated with Cather’s for the Willa Cather Foundation. You’ve read about our new life, work, and times. We’re thankful to the Cather family whose home, the National Willa Cather Center (we hope you’ve continued support and enthusiasm is integral to our work. And visited, too). While this new museum and archive was no doubt we’re appreciative of the thousands of donors, visitors, students, our most noticeable achievement, a number of other important teachers, and scholars with whom we interact. It’s your ongoing and meaningful activities took place this year. interest that affirms the work we do is valued and appreciated. Our annual Spring Conference boasted the largest number Thank you for making 2017 such a memorable year! of attendees in over a decade; our 16th International Cather Seminar in Pittsburgh combined scholarly presentations with vegetables. And one can almost hear the fiddles playing for a Letter from the President Friday evening dance in the cathedral-like barn. Lynette Krieger Common sights in the prairie landscape are the small country cemeteries. Anna is buried in Cloverton Cemetery, less than a mile north of her home. She and her husband John rest As my presidency of the Willa Cather Foundation Board of within a few feet of my own grandparents. Over the years, my Governors fades into memory, I feel renewed admiration for the cousins and other neighborhood lads have taken turns mowing many people I encountered in my tenure in this position, and the brome grasses in this calm, serene, small graveyard. There awe at the experiences we’ve shared. It has been a time of great are several Pavelkas within the gated wire boundary, where our change for the Foundation, and we know 2018 will provide a attention is drawn to the commemorative marker in the form of lattice of challenges and opportunities. a small metal plow atop a brick column. A grey granite marker Perhaps most significantly, 2018 will mark the 100th adorned with violets denotes a life once lived. Although Anna’s anniversary of the publication of Willa Cather’s well-loved grave is marked with only the years of 1869−1955, we do know novel My Ántonia. Should we, the readers of this fascinating she died on April 24, eight years to the day after the death of work, ever lose sight of the author’s inspiration, her spirit is Willa Cather. She lived a long, full life on the Nebraska prairie very present to remind us. Willa Cather’s prototype, Anna where she now rests. Pavelka, lived for many years on a Webster County farmstead In honoring Cather’s great novel, the Willa Cather located not far from the Divide. Here Anna cooked many Foundation will also be celebrating the life of Anna Pavelka holiday meals—well-worn floorboards in the kitchen show throughout 2018. We imagine she would be gratified to have us where she labored over her goose, potatoes and dressing you join in the events. and baked her family’s favorite cookies. A nearby “fruit cave,” as Cather called it, stored her preserves and canned www.WillaCather.org 1 Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence Melissa J. Homestead | University of Nebraska−Lincoln Some years ago many of us were excited by the discovery of a in the dissemination of Cather’s works. These materials also cache of Willa Cather’s correspondence with publisher Alfred A. remind us that we should be attuned to the notable gaps in Knopf that had been in the hands of Peter Prescott, one of the materials located thus far and be on the lookout for additional succession of would-be biographers of Knopf. He died before he correspondence between Cather and both of the Knopfs. Later completed it. These letters are now held in the Barbara Dobkin in this essay, in the context of some remarks about gaps in the Collection in New York City. Before these materials came to Cather-Knopf archive that may yet be filled, I say more about light, researchers, including the editors of the Willa Cather Kolodin, a man who spent most of his life working as a music Scholarly Edition, had relied on a strange and fragmentary critic but late in his life was attempting to write a biography of “memoir” Knopf wrote of his relationship with Cather based Alfred Knopf. For now, it is enough to note that he died in 1988 on his correspondence files with her, and on the more narrative and in 1989 his papers were donated to the Music Division of the essay “Miss Cather” published in The Art of Willa Cather (1973), Library of Performing Arts. His papers were not processed until a collection associated with the celebration of the centennial of 2006, however, and it is not clear precisely when the searchable Cather’s birth. The unpublished “memoir” went to the Harry finding aid was published in the NYPL finding aids database. Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, but Knopf In any event, when I searched this database in December 2016 held back the correspondence files when the Alfred A. Knopf, in preparation for a visit to the NYPL, Kolodin’s collection Inc., corporate archive was donated to the Ransom Center unexpectedly popped up. Notably Cather’s name appears in the and when he subsequently added some of his personal papers.1 body of the finding aid but is not featured among names given Cather’s correspondence with Blanche Knopf was part of the prominence as “Key Terms” at the top of the finding aid; thus if donated corporate archive, but these letters provided relatively one were to search WorldCat, which aggregates research library scant information about the composition and publication of catalog records, for Cather as an author and restrict the search Cather’s works, documenting more of their social interactions, results to archival material, this collection would not appear including gift-giving to and personal services provided for a in the results. demanding author. So what Cather materials have been sitting at the Performing This characterization of the Cather–Blanche Knopf Arts Library in Kolodin’s papers unnoticed since 1989? Thirty- correspondence at the Ransom Center vastly oversimplifies— two Cather letters, notes, and telegrams to Blanche and Alfred there is correspondence about the composition and publication Knopf and to staff members at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; carbon of Cather’s works—but Cather scholars have nevertheless copies of outgoing letters from Blanche Knopf and her secretary tended to downplay Blanche’s importance while promoting J. Florence Rubin to Cather; and twelve letters from Edith Alfred’s. For instance, biographer James Woodress states that Lewis to Alfred Knopf dating from the period after Cather’s “Not only was Knopf her publisher, but both Alfred and Blanche death, when she served as literary executor.3 Thirty-one of the Knopf, and later their son Pat, became close friends” (316).