When the London newspaper the Athenian Mercury, edited and published by the author and bookseller John Dunton, first answered questions about romance, bodily functions, and the mysteries of the universe in 1691, it may have created the template for the advice column. But the history of advice stretches back even further into the past. Advice—whether unsolicited, unwarranted, or desperately sought—appears in ancient philosophical treatises, medieval medical manuals, and countless books. Lapham’s Quarterly is exploring advice through the ages and into modern times in a series of readings and essays.
In 1908 Willa Cather was in a rut. She was thirty-four years old, working in New York City as managing editor at McClure’s Magazine, famed for its muckraking exposés. Three years had passed since she published The Troll Garden, a collection of short stories. Although she aspired to write novels, her days were consumed with editorial responsibilities, including a lengthy reporting trip to Boston to research Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.
The trip proved to have a lasting influence on Cather’s literary career. In February Alice Goldmark Brandeis, wife of prominent lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, brought Cather to the home of writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Although Cather once publicly claimed that there were few women authors she admired, she had been a fan of Jewett’s since reading The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) in her mid-twenties. Jewett was fifty-eight when she met Cather and had retired from writing after a debilitating carriage accident six years earlier.
In October 1908 Cather sent Jewett a copy of her story “On the Gulls’ Road,” which McClure’s was due to publish in December. Cather feared that her subject matter, a married woman falling in love with a passenger on an ocean liner, was too trivial and tried to preempt Jewett’s criticism: “I can’t feel that stories like that matter much.” Jewett praised the tenderness of Cather’s portrait, assuring her that the effort was worthwhile: “You are far on your road toward a fine and long story of a very high class.” But Cather’s doubts weighed on Jewett, and she wrote again two weeks later, advising Cather to dedicate all her attention to fiction. “When one’s first working power has spent itself,” Jewett wrote, “nothing ever brings it back just the same.” Without “time and quiet to perfect your work,” Cather might never improve her writing in the way she hoped. Jewett also suggested Cather draw on her childhood experiences in Virginia and the Nebraska frontier as subject matter for new stories.
Cather replied four days later, describing her months-long struggle to balance fiction writing and her magazine job.
If I have been going forward at all in the last five years, it has been progress of the head and not of the hand. At thirty-four one ought to have some sureness in their pen point and some facility in turning out a story. In other matters—things about the office—I can usually do what I set out to do and I can learn by experience, but when it comes to writing I’m a newborn baby every time—always come into it naked and shivery and without any bones. I never learn anything about it at all. I sometimes wonder whether one can possibly be meant to do the thing at which they are more blind and inept and blundering than at anything else in the world.
Jewett died from a stroke six months after this exchange. Cather quit McClure’s in 1911 and published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, a year later. She dedicated her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), a depiction of family life on the Nebraska frontier, to Jewett.
My dear Willa,
I have been thinking about you and hoping that things are going well. I cannot help saying what I think about your writing and its being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now. I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should—when one’s first working power has spent itself nothing ever brings it back just the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force of this very year could have gone into three or four stories. In The Troll Garden, “The Sculptor’s Funeral” stands alone a head higher than the rest, and it is to that level you must hold and take for a starting point. You are older now than that book in general; you have been living and reading and knowing new types, but if you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. This you are anxiously saying to yourself! But I am wondering how to get at the right conditions.
I want you to be surer of your backgrounds—you have your Nebraska life—a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the “Bohemia” of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside—you stand right in the middle of each of them when you write, without having the standpoint of the looker-on who takes them each in their relations to letters, to the world. Your good schooling and your knowledge of “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold put it, have helped you, but these you wish and need to deepen and enrich still more.
You must find a quiet place near the best companions (not those who admire and wonder at everything one does, but those who know the good things with delight!). You do need reassurance—every artist does!—but you need still more to feel “responsible for the state of your conscience” (your literary conscience, we can just now limit that quotation to), and you need to dream your dreams and go on to new and more shining ideals, to be aware of “the gleam” and to follow it; your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia, the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise, what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves. If we have patience with cheapness and thinness, as Christians must, we must know that it is cheapness and not make believe about it. To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world. But you have been growing I feel sure in the very days when you felt most hindered, and this will be counted to you. You need to have time to yourself and time to read and add to your recognitions.
I do not know when a letter has grown so long and written itself so easily, but I have been full of thought about you. You will let me hear again from you before long?
Read the other entries in this series: Inez Milholland and Eugen Boissevain, George Washington, Plutarch, Lewis Carroll, Chrétien de Troyes, Yan Zhitui, Nizam al-Mulk, Saadi, Giovanni Della Casa, Maria Edgeworth, Dan McQuade on basketball manuals, and Leopold Froehlich on syndicated advice columnists.