THE ONLY WONDERFUL THINGS
The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis
by Melissa J. Homestead
Oxford University Press
394 pages, $39.95
WHEN WILLA CATHER died in 1947, she had obtained many of the golden apples that motivate most writers: the Pulitzer Prize (for One Of Ours), honorary degrees from places like Smith College and the University of Nebraska, and bestseller status for her last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Her literary executor was a fellow Nebraskan, a woman about a decade younger named Edith Lewis with whom Cather had lived for 39 years. Devastated by Cather’s death, she wrote a memoir called Willa Cather Living and then began a search for a proper biographer. The person she finally chose was a professor at the University of Chicago named E. K. Brown. In return for being chosen, Brown, who died before he could finish the biography (which was completed by Leon Edel), virtually eliminated Lewis from his account. The woman with whom Cather had shared much of her life, who nursed Cather after her operations, traveled with her to the Southwest, Europe, New England, and Canada, was erased, because Brown didn’t want to think that Lewis and Cather might have been more than roommates. As Brown put it in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, another Nebraska novelist whom he’d asked for memories of Cather: “I think it would help my portrait if you could quietly show that in the Pittsburgh years she was eager to know quite a variety of people, and particularly that she was often—or least sometimes, I hope it was often—at least mildly interested in men.”
Cather was of course interested in men—in fact, she seems to have adored her brothers far more than her sisters. She also created some of the most memorable male characters in American literature. She had, in fact, an uncanny ability to portray sensitive, alienated young men who seem somehow gay, even when they’re not. It’s not just the much-anthologized short story “Paul’s Case,” which is clearly about a young queen; even Emil, the brother of the heroine of O Pioneers!, or Neil Herbert in A Lost Lady, or Jim Burden in My Ántonia, exude a sad sensitivity that is the opposite of what we call these days “toxic masculinity.” For E. K. Brown, the trouble was that Cather wasn’t even mildly interested in men in the way that Brown meant. All of her romantic relationships were with women.
That’s why Melissa Homestead has written The Only Wonderful Things: to rescue Edith Lewis from the oblivion to which Brown and other biographers have consigned her. This book is a meticulously researched portrait of the life that Cather and Lewis shared as partners in what used to be called a “Boston marriage,” a late 19th-century term for two women of independent means who lived together—like Sarah Orne Jewett (The County of The Pointed Firs) and Annie Fields, whom Cather visited in, yes, Boston, after she moved east. Jewett encouraged Cather to write about the love of one woman for another, but Cather never took her advice, perhaps because by the 1920s the term “Boston marriage” had been eroticized with the L-word. And the L-word was so awful that when the novelist Daphne du Maurier fell in love with the wife of her American publisher, Nelson Doubleday, she wrote to Mrs. Doubleday: “by God and by Christ, if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with ‘L,’ I’d tear their guts out”—a rather butch way to put it.
When Cather was going to the University of Nebraska, she reviewed plays put on by touring companies passing through Lincoln, and she was so tough a critic that she was known as “the Meat-Axe” by actors on the circuit. There was always something self-possessed and confident about her—“heavy-footed,” said D. H. Lawrence—though it took her about a decade to find her way as a writer. First, she moved to Pittsburgh after graduation, where she taught school, edited a magazine, and fell in love with Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a local judge. She was still living in Pittsburgh when, on one of her trips back to Lincoln, she met Edith Lewis in the home of a mutual friend. Lewis, who’d grown up in Lincoln and gone east to Smith College, was about to move to New York to begin her career as a writer. When Cather finally moved to New York after a decade in Pittsburgh (to work for a muckraking magazine called McClure’s), she looked Edith Lewis up, and eventually moved in with her. They would live together for the rest of their lives, first in Greenwich Village and later, when both women were established in their careers, on Park Avenue—two sophisticated, successful New York career women who loved the arts, traveled widely, and entertained friends like Yehudi Menuhin in their home.
Early in life, Lewis had been a talented violinist who gave that up for literature when she began publishing poems and stories in magazines in Nebraska, and later New York, where she appeared in some of the same magazines Cather did. But at some point she decided she had to make a living, so she took a job at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, where she eventually became the sole copywriter for two important accounts, Woodbury’s Facial Soap and Jergens Lotion. On one occasion, an ad Lewis wrote for Woodbury’s appeared on the same magazine page as a short story by Cather—who was by no means unaware of the irony. Cather was well aware that she had to market her books. To do this, she let Lewis write the promotional copy for her new novels, always made sure she had an interview set up when a book was coming out, and dumped her first publisher in part because she felt they were not advertising her books properly. Cather aspired to the status of an Artist while living with, and getting help from, a very intelligent woman who had given up the arts to earn a living by selling soap. This is “the kind of advertising work Edith does,” Cather wrote to a friend. “The text and sketch are both hers. It’s very interesting work and requires a great knowledge of types and printing—and of the dullness of the average mind.”
The two of them traveled a lot. When they stayed in hotels they took separate but adjacent rooms. And while they went many places together—trips to the desert Southwest, long stays at an inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (the town in which both women are buried beside one another), where Cather liked to write—they also built a cottage, with separate bedrooms, in Whale Cove, a women-only colony on a Canadian island called Grand Manan. Of Whale Cove, Edith wrote to a male friend whom she hoped would visit: “I would get you a room at the Marathon Hotel, as Whale Cove Cottage, where we go for our meals, is entirely filled with elderly ladies, mostly single, and nearly all librarians or social workers, and I feel they would depress you, even if you could get in.”
They traveled separately as well, sometimes for very long periods. Lewis frequently took time off from the ad agency, once as long as four months, to recover her health. When together, they entertained friends in their apartment in New York. They even dressed alike on occasion—in the sticks, at least. Clothes seem to put Homestead on high alert. Cather was famous for having cut her hair like a man’s early in life, for signing herself as “William Cather,” and, in a photo by Edward Steichen, for wearing a middy blouse and necktie that seem like a feminine version of a man’s attire. When she and Edith went to the Southwest or to Grand Manan, both women got to wear pants, jackets, and hats that make them look like Teddy Roosevelt about to storm San Juan Hill.
The photographs themselves testify to the privacy the two women insisted on. From the days before selfies, there are only two pictures in which Cather and Lewis appear together. In the Southwest, each woman stands in her explorer’s drag with her horse amid the desert rocks. The photographs, like the adjacent hotel rooms or the letters they wrote to third parties in which Cather refers to Edith as “Miss Lewis” and Lewis to Willa as “Miss Cather,” establish a certain distance. When Edith writes about Willa to Mabel Dodge Luhan, the woman who got both D. H. Lawrence and Cather to come to Taos, it’s: “Miss Cather is still pursuing Father Martinez through all the books in the Museum” (doing research for Death Comes for the Archbishop). And when Cather writes to a less than intimate friend, it’s: “I’ve been at Grand Manan for the last two months, an island off the coast of New Brunswick, where Miss Lewis and I have built a little home.” To friends and family with whom they felt close, it was another matter. On the top of a photograph of the same cottage, this time tinted in color by Edith, which she sent to one of her beloved brothers, Cather simply wrote: “This is our little home.” In other words, both women revealed their relationship selectively. When Cather writes to her close friends the Brewsters, two artists who lived in Europe, she could say of Edith: “As you know, she does not care for a great many people, and for them she cares very much.” And then she adds: “Dear friends, there are so many things I wish to say to you—about painting, about writing, about ourselves and this queer business of living,” and then signs off as part of a couple: “We both send you our dearest love and wish you happy working-days with all the deep satisfaction they bring.” In other words, how out she and Lewis were depended on whom they were addressing.
Lewis, according to a young woman who worked for her at a magazine called Every Week, was “the best boss I ever had, the most intelligent, the most just, the kindest and the bluntest.” But however great a boss, one can only reflect when reading Homestead’s book that were it not for Cather, Lewis would be the unknown author of dozens of ads for Woodbury’s Facial Soap and Jergens Lotion. Biography is cruel: only the Cathers of this world are written about. The only people more anonymous than the sculptors who adorned the medieval cathedrals of France are advertising copywriters.
Homestead is arguing, however, that Lewis had a part in Cather’s art as well. To do this she takes Lewis seriously as a writer, first for her short stories and then, after Lewis abandoned literature, for her ad copy. And she does this according to the literary principles that Cather famously introduced in an essay called “The Novel Démeublé” (French for “unfurnished”). In this essay Cather basically argued for “Less is More,” though in her version it’s “The Thing Not Named.” Aha, you think, that must refer to same-desire desire! But no: “The Thing Not Named” is more general than that. Cather believed that whatever is left off the page remains in the reader’s mind, even more powerfully, precisely because it has not been mentioned. Homestead sees the same literary tactic in Lewis’ ads for soap and hand lotion.
At this point the reader may well ask: Why is ad copy for Woodbury’s being analyzed as if it’s a chapter of My Ántonia? The first answer might be, because Homestead is resuscitating a woman who’s been erased by homophobic biographers, and copywriting was her métier. The second is that, given the culture of the United States, what is the difference? Lewis and Cather started out in the same place—longing to get out of Nebraska, wanting to be writers—and the way they ended up represents not just Commerce versus Art but the way in which the two realms intersect (long before Andy Warhol). Both Lewis and Cather valued economy of language, and both were dealing with the American market. The women Lewis was appealing to in her ads look, in fact, like the heroines in a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (a great admirer of Cather’s work). The copy she writes for one Woodbury’s ad summons his fictional world: “Gold slippers above the asphalt pavement … the flash of jewels under the softness of furs … the purring of motorcars, crowding the curb … drift of music through the heavy, half-opened doors.” She even got Fitzgerald to be a judge in a contest for the twelve most beautiful women who used Woodbury’s soap. Not only did Lewis write the promotional copy for Cather’s novels; she also read Cather’s drafts aloud to her as they were editing them. Most tellingly, Homestead uses the typescript of Cather’s novel The Professor’s House to show just where Lewis made cuts and line changes.
I suppose this is the most surprising revelation in Homestead’s book, but one doesn’t know quite how much weight to give it. Surely the magic of Cather’s writing, the myths she made of the land and people who lived on the prairie outside Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town in which she grew up, is the main reason for her place in American letters. But even if Lewis did have a role in the final version of Cather’s books, it’s still of minor interest. What makes The Only Wonderful Things such a fascinating book is its detailed portrait of a relationship between two ambitious women who lived at a time when a Boston marriage was becoming openly sexualized.
Of course, because both women were intensely private, it’s impossible to conclude just where their cohabitation falls on the spectrum between a Boston marriage and lesbian bed death. The sexual mechanics remain offstage. But there are so many letters in which they refer to one another as “Miss Lewis” and “Miss Cather” that one almost wants to cheer toward the end of the book when Cather addresses a letter to “My darling Edith.”
There are not as many letters as a biographer would wish for: Edith burned a lot of them in the basement of their apartment building, along with “six pounds of cuts”: passages that Lewis had excised from Cather’s novels and actually weighed on a scale. But if the point of this book is to show that Cather and Lewis were lesbians, then there are enough to go on. And if the point is to redress the biographical erasure of Edith Lewis, then that’s accomplished as well. But those separate bedrooms, adjacent hotel rooms, and months apart, those letters in which they refer to one another so formally, make one think of Gore Vidal’s claim that he and his life partner Howard Austen never had sex. It’s impossible to penetrate the mystery that is any couple. That said, The Only Wonderful Things gives us a fascinating portrait not only of a marriage but of American culture at a particular time and place.
That’s because something was going on in the 1920s among American artists that had to do with a rebellion against the very world J. Walter Thompson was creating—the world of 24/7 media, advertising, data collection, and consumerism that we inhabit today—and that was a nostalgia for the agrarian past that corporate urban America was destroying. William Jennings Bryan, the Bernie Sanders of his day (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a Cross of Gold!”), was, we learn here, a friend of Edith Lewis’ family in Lincoln. Bryan, like the artists to come in the 1920s and ‘30s, was rebelling against the age of the railroads and corporate finance during which the U.S. was to become the richest nation on earth. Reading the prairie novels of Willa Cather, one is constantly thinking of other works of art—the music of Aaron Copland, the choreography of Agnes de Mille, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! At a certain point in O Pioneers!, you almost hear “Poor Jud is Dead” when you realize which way the plot is going. There are villains in Cather, bad guys, mean men, drunk and jealous husbands, stupid, stubborn farmers who lead stunted, brutish lives. And there are the angels, the heroines she so clearly loves, and the sensitive young men who are drawn to these warm-hearted, and often masculine, heroines. But the good guys are always rooted in the agrarian past.
Critic Edmund Wilson considered Cather’s work “retrograde,” but Wilson’s Princeton classmate, the very modern F. Scott Fitzgerald, was so taken by the heroine of Cather’s A Lost Lady that he wrote the author a letter apologizing for any similarities between the heroine of her book and his own Daisy Buchanan. Cather wrote a gracious letter saying that she had “hugely enjoyed” The Great Gatsby, and went on to say that it’s impossible to convey someone’s charm on the page, only the effect that charm has on others. That Cather’s Mrs. Forrester and Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan had anything in common may sound strange. But both writers were Midwesterners who felt a deep nostalgia for what was being obliterated by Edith Lewis’ employer. The real shock is how much the ending of The Great Gatsby resembles the last paragraph of My Ántonia.
Andrew Holleran is the author of the novelsDancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, and Grief.
