SONGS OF CORRESPONDENCE | LYRICS
MARIEL
It was just a week ago that I watched you all get farther and farther away and then I had to overcome a mighty impulse to jump off of the train and run back to Lincoln
I’ve only been a few hours in this city of Dreadful Dirt came from Chicago by the B&O Five gentlemen met me at the train and everyone seems really glad to see me back
People here think I’m cleverer than I am and of course that is pleasant in a way
But I’d rather have Roscoe’s good opinion and Douglass’s laugh than all of it
You stood by me in the day when my friends were not many and when I owed much more to your friendship than I knew And by the Lord I’m going to make you glad you did it someday I’d rather make you and Roscoe proud of me than anything else in the world
There is no God but one God, and Art is His Revealer
That is my creed and I’ll follow it to the end to a hotter place if need be than Pittsburgh
ELSIE
Dear Elsie I’ve been tramping about the West in New Mexico and Arizona
We start every morning by wagon at daylight days in the canyon and nights in bed
Just back from a long trip with the priest out to his missions
Wonderful villages each about its church
I’ve caught step at last and bit by new ideas!
And now about Winslow….
Tin cans and old shoes, a town on the railroad
My brother’s casa’s an eggshell affair
I feel pretty sure Winslow would depress you stolid humanity, tin cans and shoes
I went to a Mexican dance such music and such dancing!
A boy who was singing, a string trio playing
I made a “translation” of one of the songs:
The flowers of day are dead, come thou to me!
The rose of night instead shall bloom for thee
Stars by day entombed in darkness wake; the rose of night has bloomed - Beloved, take!
The wine of day is spent, the springs are dry
So long above them bent the ardent sky
A thirsty lip since dawn hath pressed the fountain’s brink; The wine of night is drawn - Beloved, drink!
The eyes of night are shut, so thine should be
The tilted stars fade but to dream of thee
Dew-drenched blossoms spill their odors deep; The heart of night is still - Beloved, sleep!
I’m going to Albuquerque, it’s the most beautiful country I’ve seen
There’s something Spanish in the air, eternal sage and rabbit brush
It’s all consuming and so big and bright!
I am sure I could work in New Mexico, such big country!
The Lord set the stage so splendidly here
It can’t have been all for nothing - there must be hope!
There is a strong pull, a Bigness, a current
I’ll run about, see a lot, fade away in search of four walls in which one can writetin cans and old shoes, a tang on the tongue
Tin cans. Old shoes.
ALFRED
Dear Mr Greenslet, the novel will be done by midsummer What would you think of The Song Of The Lark? The title’s still uncertain
My friend Mr Hendrick who is now with Doubleday came to see me and I’m feeling wistful They are getting such astonishing results - even highbrow writers!
Dear Mr Greenslet, I was well satisfied with the advertising you gave O Pioneers, but I think this book ought to be pushed harder I want to sell a good many copies I shall need money and time to write I do not want to stop to replenish my bank account
Dear Mrs Knopf, the wonderful basket of fruit you sent lasted nearly all the way across the ocean The weather was fine, I got complete rest and reached Paris full of pep
Dear Mr Greenslet, Knopf is going to publish this next book I hope you won’t consider this departure a final break only a break with your publicity men
Dear Mr Knopf, Miss Lewis will see you Today and will deliver a bunch of manuscripts to you with explanations Please let me hear from you as soon as you have read I don’t want to delay publication too long Of course if we can get serial publication I would like it because of the money
Dear Alfred, I suppose that awful Good Housekeeping portrait is good publicity it’s bringing in a ton of letters from the queerest kind of people Splashy ladies on Park Avenue, farmers’ wives in Minnesota all equally unable to write an English sentence
Jupiter and Venus both shining in the golden rosy sky a still daylight sky guiltless of other stars these two alone in the whole vault of heaven
And now I must dress my darling Edith I must dress to receive the planets dear they will not wait for anybody
The Twinnies
My Dear Twinnies, Naughty Elizabeth who has not written to me and nice Margaret who did!
Yesterday I climbed up the tower of Notre Dame and spent the morning among my old friends, the gargoyles
There are figures like these all over the many roofs
I am sure all were Quasimodo’s friends, Quasimodo’s playfellows Gargoyles are perched all over Notre Dame they have been there since the year twelve hundred
Today is the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille
It’s the greatest holiday of the year and the people are dancing in the street
Last night a taxi drove us all about the little streets
In the poor part of the city there was dancing at every little cafe
I went to lunch with Yehudi Menuhin and his family
He has two little sisters aged nine and seven
Simply fairy tale children
They were in Paris just for one day and we had a very exciting time!
The champagne I like best is Louis Roederer
Nineteen twenty-nine is a grand year
Also twenty-six is very fine
My darling Edith, I am sitting in your room looking out on the woods you know so well
One hour from now, out of your window, I shall see a sight unparalleled
You must both come here my dears before you do any desperate thing like getting married!
I have just come back from the country and find your telegram the account of Hugo’s death in the Sunday papers
What a dreadful shock to you!
Wasn’t it fortunate that you had that jolly honeymoon together in Mexico?
But why did it happen so soon, less than a year after you were married?
It’s a brutal fact dear Zoë that after one is forty-five, it simply rains death all about one
I never open the morning paper without seeing the death of someone I used to know
And in the days when I first knew you people didn’t used to die at all
Death just becomes a deep benumbing fact in one’s life
Long before it ends one
Keep up your routine dear Zoë, keep your life going as you’ve always done
You will be less lonely that way
Personal life is rather a failure, without exception nearly always so
But something rather nice does happen in the mind itself as one grows older
If it hasn’t begun with you yet keep your courage it will happen
A kind of golden light comes as compensation for many losses
I wish I could have saved you this hard knock my dear, Willa Mrs Austin
Dear Mrs Austin, a week ago today I first went up to your lovely house to see whether I could settle down to work there and I have not missed a morning since then
It is the most restful, quiet, sympathetic place to work in
I do not use your little study but sit in your dear little blue plush chair in that corner of the library
I hope I won’t wear that chair out
My love and good wishes to you dear Mrs Austin and my gratitude for the many peaceful hours I have spent in your library
DOROTHY
Dear Dorothy, I can’t thank you enough for the letter you wrote me from Spain I still have it by me
It reached me in my little home on Grand Manan an island thirty-five miles off from shore
I came here after the Yale commencement really got rest and began to like life again the funny thing is that with a story forming you have to be alone with it just like a thief alone with just the precious cursed stuff you have stolen and are hiding from everybody
I’m always wonderfully glad to please you Dorothy the letter you wrote me about O Pioneers was the most helpful “hand-up” I had
You know better than anyone else what a long way I had to go to get anywhere strange to write at last with calm enjoyment after such storm and struggle But Lord, what a lot of life one uses up chasing “bright Medusa’s” I think we ought to get together and compare our scars, like doughboys
Dear Dorothy, sometime when you come back from Rome won’t you let me come talk to you?
I want to talk about a few things with you more than with anybody else Futurist painting, wide open art, I’d give a great deal to talk about these things
We knew one world and how we both felt about it
We now find ourselves in quite another I wish I knew how it all strikes you
Anyhow, I don’t want to live in the new world they promise meit's not to my taste
Affectionately, Willa
MY NAMESAKE
My dear Namesake, You mother has sent me several pictures of you which makes me feel that you are a real little girl and not just a name
She tells me that you are now seven years old
That is a very nice age!
I remember having enjoyed things very much when I was seven
Four years ago one of my dearest friends was seven years old but alas that was four years ago and now she is eleven
I hope your next four years will be as jolly as hers have been
The best thing I can wish for you is that you will be absolutely sincere absolutely sincere in your likes, absolutely sincere in your dislikes
If when you grow older my books bore you terribly be honest about it and don’t try to pretend to like them
I wish you lots of friends and happy vacations
Cordially yours, Willa Cather
VIOLA
I have been thinking of you in connection with the death of the world that beautiful old world which we thought would last forever
Why should the beautiful cities that were a thousand years a-making tumble down on our heads now, in our short lifetime?
The reason I have not written before is that two of my younger brothers, all of my nieces and nephews, and the children of my friends these young people are now uprooted and some of them quite lost
None of the young people are doing what they wanted or were prepared to do
Two young professors at Amherst, such nice boys write me from the mud of Guadalcanal
my dearest young niece only knows that her husband is “somewhere in the Pacific”
So many of the boys from my own little town in Nebraska shunted out to those terrible islands to be eaten up by bugs and lie in slime
Of course we have brought it all on ourselves or rather our smart scientists have brought it on us
Goodbye my friend, and I hope you are more successful than I in keeping calm
It’s bad enough to have all our splendid young men die
But even they, plucky fellows, do not want the world to die
I’m somehow sure that you feel these things feel them more than most people and that maybe you would like an expression from an old friend who also feels the outrageousness of fate
ROSCOE
Roscoe, my dear Roscoe
Do you remember when we children used to sleep up in the attic?
Up in the attic in Red Cloud, and listen to the train whistle?
Your Christmas note brought me back to those old days
Do you remember when we rode on the rear platform of the train?
It was starry and fairly chilly, but we sat out there and wondered about the future and how we could ever manage to hang together in a world which seemed to be a slippery glass sphere
We managed to hang on to the slippery globe a good while
Do you remember sitting on top of the fifty foot windmill?
We could see right off the edge of the world as you would say
The red harvest moon rose over lagoons and wheat fields cottonwoods and corn tassels white as silver
Do you remember a long time ago you wrote me such a dear letter?
You said “we must take each other as we are”
That doesn’t sound very profound, but it is profound
If more families lived up to it, there would be a good deal more peace in the world
Take each other as we are. Do you remember?
Special thanks to Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, as well as the University of Nebraska, Baldwin Wallace University, Callahan Foundation, and Bascom Little Fund
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