'Wonderful Words' In Willa Cather's No-Longer-Secret Letters
But the original story — that of Cather's cousin Grosvenor, born on the farm next to her father's — was too compelling. In the letter, Cather described taking care of Grosvenor when he was little. "We were very much alike, and very different," she wrote. "He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous. ... I was staying on his father's farm when the war broke out. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind.
"I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose," she continued. "It was all too painfully familiar. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all."
It's a brutally honest letter, and Jewell says that comes through in the novel. Though the character of Claude contains some elements of Cather herself, "he kind of was a person who was not a very strong person. ... He was intelligent but did not have good application of intelligence, didn't have the confidence to make strong choices in his life, was not really in control of his life. And Cather, as a woman who was so in control of her life, who was so confident in who she was, from a very young age, I think had little interest in the kind of weakling that she understood her cousin to be. But it's to her credit that she saw him differently, that she suddenly realized something about him and saw him with much more tenderness."
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