At the beginning of 1906 McClure's Magazine was a fabulously successful enterprise under the editorial direction of an erratic genius, Samuel S. McClure. As the journalist Mark Sullivan wrote in his autobiography, McClure "was the pre-eminent magazine genius, easily first, in a period in which magazines flowered as never before." For the previous three years his magazine had led the muckraking movement in exposing graft, corruption, dishonesty, and venality in big business, in government at all levels, and even in the labor unions. In January 1903, S. S. McClure had written an editorial announcing the movement, as he simultaneously published the third in Ida Tarbell's sensational series on the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens's exposure of municipal corruption in Minneapolis, and Ray Stannard Baker's article on lawlessness in the mineworkers' union.

Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker, all working for McClure at the same time, gave the magazine a brilliance perhaps unsurpassed in American magazine history. McClure had a genius for discovering talent and directing it. He had a passion for accuracy and facts and an old-fashioned missionary zeal to cure the ills in the body politic. As an impoverished Irish immigrant who had come to America with his widowed mother at the age of nine, he was Horatio Alger in real life. He worked his way through Knox College in Illinois, married a professor's daughter, talked his way into the editorship of a bicycle magazine in Boston, organized the first important newspaper syndicate, and founded his magazine in the midst of the Panic of 1893. Remarkably, his journal survived and in three years reached a circulation of three hundred thousand. The December 1896 issue, McClure wrote modestly, had "more pages of paid advertising than any other magazine at any time in the history of the world."

McClure's biographer believes the magazine "was the most exciting, the liveliest, the best illustrated, the most handsomely dressed, the most interesting, and the most profitable of an abundance of superior magazines. Indeed, for the fifteen years from 1891to 1910 McClure's was probably the best general magazine ever to be published anywhere. judged from the standpoint of impact on its times, of the daring and vision of its editorial formula, of the sustained excellence of its editorial matter, McClure's has never had a peer." The biographer, who is McClure's grandson, may exaggerate a little, but not much. McClure's was a supernova in the journalistic firmament. Besides a talent for picking writers, McClure could talk almost anyone into working for him, and when he did, he gave them a free hand. He plowed his profits back into the magazine and thought nothing of spending thousands of dollars on one story.

After Baker joined McClure's, he found everything different from the haste and superficiality of the newspaper world. When he was assigned to write a piece on General Leonard Wood, he visited Cuba, Massachusetts, and Washington and spent five or six weeks gathering material, all the while on salary and expense account. Ida Tarbell recalled in her autobiography: "I spent the greater part of five years on 'The History of the Standard Oil Company,' . . . I know of no other editor and no other publisher who has so fully recognized the necessity of generous pay and ample time." This openhandedness was unprecedented in that day; editors of most magazines sat in their offices and waited for contributions to come in the mail bag.

McClure not only hired brilliant investigative reporters; he also had a nose for sniffing out good fiction and paid generously for it. Much of Kipling's best work appeared in McClure's, and Stevenson was one of McClure's great enthusiasms. He published Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Jack London, Mark Twain, and Conan Doyle. He thought that he had probably lost more money publishing Joseph Conrad than anyone else. He also published Anthony Hope Hawkins, J. M. Barrie, William Allen White, Bret Harte, Booth Tarkington, Hamlin Garland, Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Then he bought memoirs of prominent people like Carl Schurz and Ellen Terry, commissioned interviews with Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and gave his readers the first magazine accounts of the Wright brothers' flight and Marconi's wireless transmissions. When McClure read in the paper about Roentgen rays, he sent a reporter all the way to Germany to get a story on this new marvel.

As a genius, however, McClure was a hard man to work for. At the time he summoned Cather to New York in 1903 and bewitched her with his ebullient personality and undeniable charm, he was philandering with a third-rate woman poet, bounding back and forth across the country and to Europe looking for talent, throwing off editorial ideas like a Fourth of July pinwheel, and spending the company's money as though it were inexhaustible. The hard work of getting out the magazine was left for Ida Tarbell and others, and the business affairs fell to John Phillips, his former college classmate, who had been with him for many years. Finally the strain of living and working with McClure, of trying to keep his indiscretions from causing scandal, of thwarting his schemes for bankrupting the company, proved too much for Tarbell and Phillips. When McClure insisted on planning a new magazine, starting a People's University, a textbook publishing company, a People's Life Insurance Company, and a People's Bank, his associates had had all they could stand.

In late March 1 906 when McClure returned from one of his many trips to Europe, they confronted him with an ultimatum. Either he would sell out his interest in the magazine to Tarbell and Phillips, or they would sell out to him. They could no longer work with him unless they could control the company's affairs. Both sides thrashed about during April. McClure wrote Phillips that he could not give up his magazine: "Kings who have come to the end of their tether, as a rule suffer death rather than give up part of their power." He felt the same way. The outcome was that McClure made arrange ments to buy out his partners. His former associates then left him for good, taking with them Steffens, Baker, and a good many other members of the staff. McClure was left only with writer Burton Hendricks, his chief manuscript reader Viola Roseboro', and the office boy Witter Bynner. On May 10 the rebels cleaned out their desks and departed. Late that afternoon Bynner found McClure sitting alone in the editorial department. "Bynner, " he asked, "are you leaving me too?" Bynner could not speak. McClure broke into sobs.

McClure had been hedging his bets, however, as he saw the blowup coming. His quick trip to Pittsburgh to hire Cather had taken place two months before, and on May 10 she was already at work. There wasn't even time to find a boardinghouse or apartment. She came to New York accompanied by her librarian friend May Willard, and the two women put up at the Hotel Griffon on West Ninth Street. She must have begun -her new job in April and worked steadily through the spring. By the end of June she had to take a week off to rest. Events had moved so fast that she hardly had time to reflect that the girl from Red Cloud, Nebraska, had made it to the publishing capital of the United States and the staff of a great national magazine. She had fought her way to the top in a man's world, and in two more years she would be managing editor of McClure's.

 

50.  Washington Square taken in December 1905, by George BaIgue. Courtesy of U.S. History, Local History & Genealogy Division, The New York Public Library; Astor,Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

51.    Cather as managing editor of McClure's. The necklace was a gift from Sarah Orne Jewett. Courtesy Of WCPMC-NSHS

52.    S. S. McClure. Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

53.   Portrait of Elizabeth Sergeant by Auguste Chabaud. Courtesy of WCPMC-NSHS

54.   Zoe Akins. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

55.   Sarah Orne Jewett. Courtesy of Colby College, Waterville, Maine

56.   Annie Fields. By permission of the Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts
 

Ellery Sedgwick in his autobiography reported that a week at McClure's "was the precise reversal of the six busy days described in the first chapter of Genesis. It seemed to end in a world without form and void. From Order came forth Chaos." The staff worked under some natural law of desperation. The chief was continually interrupting, cutting, and revising, and the staff made periodic efforts to circumvent him by hiding out in nearby hotel rooms in order to finish articles and to meet deadlines. "Yet with all his pokings and proddings the fires he kindled were brighter than any flames his staff could produce without him.... The intensity of McClure's enthusiasm would bring any project to a white heat." William Allen White used to say that "Sam had three hundred ideas a minute," and Edith Lewis, a proofreader on the magazine, remembered that he wanted all his ideas acted on immediately. "Some of his ideas were journalistic inspirations, some, of course, were very impractical; he did not bother to sort them out, he expected his staff to do that." Lewis also recalled that working on McClure's was like working in a high wind. Yet in spite of the fireworks McClure never lost his temper, treating everyone courteously, office boys and managing editors alike, and when Tarbel and Phillips defected, he wrote: "They leave me retaining my deepest love and affection and esteem and confidence. I think I may say it is the greatest tragedy thus far of my life to lose them."

This was the man whose life was inextricably entwined with Cather's for the next six years and to a lesser extent beyond that. That she was devoted to him is without question, but she could see him objectively; and a half a dozen years after they were both out of the magazine, she wrote a story "Ardessa, " laid in a magazine office like McClure's. The editor, who is named O'Mally, has come out of the West like McClure and has built a great muckraking magazine in six incredible years. On his staff are five famous men, every one of whom he has made ("it amused him to manufacture celebrities"); but no amount of recognition can make a stuffed shirt out of O'Mally. He is a born gambler and a soldier of fortune: "O'Mally went in for everything; and got tired of everything; that was why he made a good editor." It is restful, however, when O'Mally is back visiting in Nevada, his home state. Then the great men of the staff are left alone, "as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his care." The story concerns the boss's secretary, Ardessa, who has grown lazy during O'Mally's many absences, and O'Mally's devious efforts to get rid of her. He has a soft heart like McClure, and when he asks the business manager to take his secretary off his hands, he says: "I can't do anything. She's got the upper hand of me.... I can't discipline people."

Cather must have wondered sometimes about the fate that had landed her on the staff of a muckraking magazine. She had little interest in McClure's crusading zeal, found social reformers very dull people, and took the dimmest possible view of literature that had a social message. She did not despise the expert investigative reporting that McClure's published and thought it had its place, but her eye was always on art. "Economics and art are strangers," she wrote later. Fortunately Cather usually could concentrate on buying fiction and poetry for the magazine and leave the social issues for her colleagues to contend with. She and Viola Roseboro' read the manuscripts that flooded in from hopeful fiction writers and poets, nearly all of which were uniformly bad and unpublishable. She did have to spend some of her time whipping into publishable form articles by semiliterate writers who knew all about copper mines in the West but could not get their material down on paper.

One of the first writers Cather dealt with as a member of McClure's staff was Harrison Dwight, who had been born in Constantinople, had been a diplomat and foreign correspondent, and was then curator of the Author's Club in New York. He was a friend of May Willard, who introduced him to Cather soon after she arrived in New York. She slipped easily into the role of fiction editor, just as she had assumed without any experience the role of drama and music critic. She liked a story he submitted, "The Valley of the Mills, " which had an exotic Turkish setting. She suggested changes and cuts, and after he tinkered with the tale, she bought it for a future issue. She must have been rather blunt in her criticism, however, for when Dwight commented on her candor, she replied that there was no use talking about such things unless one were candid. She admitted that when she read stories she had violent feelings one way or the other. She always wanted to hang garlands on people or to put them to torture, according to the way they managed or mismanaged a possibility. She liked Dwight's story enough to persuade McClure to spend five hundred dollars commissioning Frank Brangwyn, a British artist whom she thought the best painter of oriental subjects alive, to illustrate it.

Meetings and discussions of this story led to a friendship and Cather's requests to see more of Dwight's work. She liked another story, but Dwight apparently couldn't revise it to her satisfaction, and she never bought anything more from him. They must have disagreed on a number of things, and in a letter after he had gone back to Europe, Cather wanted to know why he so scorned Pierre Loti. She had seen a resemblance to Loti in some of his work, but he had not been flattered. She said that she would swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in her work. She said she could not figure out why he was afraid to touch the poetic aspect of things and concluded that his problem was that he was afraid of being sentimental. She envied him his travels while she was grinding away at the office and hoped he would find some more exotic tales for them. As long as she was at McClure's, his work would have an ardent advocate. She loved his outlandish and picturesque settings, but what he had to do was to make the story run a little hotter and swifter through his atmosphere. She also told him on another occasion that she always held out in argument that a feeling could be a story just as much as an incident.

It was hot in New York that summer, and Cather did not get back to Red Cloud that year. Life in New York, however, was exciting, and she was thrilled to be a part of the metropolis. She had been to New York perhaps eight times during her Pittsburgh years, and in Edith Lewis she had a friend who already was working there. After making her way by stages from the Divide, to Red Cloud, to Lincoln, to Pittsburgh, and finally to New York, she never left the city to live elsewhere. She made many trips to the West in subsequent years and later spent the summers on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy and autumns in New Hampshire, but she remained a resident of New York. She often complained about the noise and dirt and the everincreasing vulgarity, but she died in Manhattan forty-one years later. Even before she had been in New York a year, she was writing Dwight that the city was big and raw and relentless and grinds one up into little bits every day. The New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and all the amenities of life available in the metropolis kept her there.

In October Cather went back to Pittsburgh for three weeks to visit Isabelle, and when she returned she moved into a studio apartment at 60 South Washington Square, in the same building with Lewis, and commuted to the magazine office on East Twenty-third Street. Greenwich Village at that time was a pleasant place to live. Few automobiles yet marred the urban scene, and on the north side of Washington Square the long row of mellow brick houses gave the area an aristocratic look. On the south side of the square were less pretentious buildings occupied by writers and artists. The studio apartments that painter Don Hedger and singer Eden Bower occupy in the story "Coming, Aphrodite!" are drawn from Cather's memory of her early years in New York. These characters live on the top floor of an old house and share a grubby bathroom at the end of the hall. Hedger's single room with a cheerless northern exposure looks out on a court and the roofs and walls of other buildings. He has a sink, a table, and two gas burners in one corner. Eden Bower's apartment is somewhat pleasanter-two rooms facing west on the square.

But down below, the square was lovely that summer. The fountain had been turned on for the season and was "throwing up a mist of rainbow water which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky leaves, and the Brevoort [Hotel] glistening in its spring coat of paint, and shining horses and carriages, -occasionally an automobile." Farther uptown were the theaters and the opera house, and still beyond them was Central Park.

Cather's ambition to make a successful career in a man's world was realized brilliantly at McClure's, but her other goal, to become an artist, was derailed during her years on the magazine. She wrote Dwight nine months after going to New York that she wondered if she ever would write another line of anything she cared about. It seemed improbable at that point, and she thought that people seldom got out of this sort of coil once they were in it. Her mind was so full of things other than her own writing that ideas had simply stopped coming. She was feeling no impulse to do anything except grind and edit. As a result, she wrote very little to please herself during her years at McClure's. She published four stories in 1907, but these no doubt had been written before leaving Pittsburgh. In 19o8 and 1909 she wrote just one story each year, and the following year is a total blank. During 1911, the last year in which she gave the magazine her full attention, she published one tale and managed to write a short novel, her first.

All four of the stories Cather published in 1907 are very competently written, very professional, and very Jamesian. They also are rather bloodless. She still was playing the sedulous ape to Henry James in matters of style and technique, character, subject matter, and theme. Three of the four tales deal with artists, and three are testimony to her lifelong love affair with France, with settings in Paris and Normandy. She placed three in McClure's, and sold the fourth to the Century. "The Namesake," which appeared first, is the story that owes its inspiration to the uncle who had died in the Civil War. The others are "The Profile," "The Willing Muse," and "Eleanor's House."

"The Profile" also has a literary antecedent in Hawthorne and is so reminiscent of "The Birthmark" that Witter Bynner in his old age remembered it by that title. He recalled that McClure's staff tried to talk her out of publishing the tale on grounds that it would hurt the friend on whose physical disfigurement it was based. The story appeared in the magazine, however, and nothing happened; but it is another case of Cather's insensitivity to the use of real people as suggestions for her fictional characters.

The story deals with a portrait painter who is commissioned to paint the daughter of a rich California rancher. The girl is painted in profile because she has a dreadful scar from a burn sustained in childhood, but she acts totally unconscious of the mark, as though she never had seen herself in the mirror. The artist falls in love with the girl, marries her, and as the years pass becomes obsessed with the necessity of making his wife acknowledge just once her disfigurement. Meantime, a young cousin comes to Paris to study and stays with the painter and his wife. The painter falls in love with the cousin, the wife reproaches him, and in a moment of anger he speaks to her of the scar. The wife reacts violently and takes the next train for Nice; and the next morning the cousin's face is badly burned when her study lamp explodes. After the wife sues for divorce, the painter marries the cousin, his second wife with a facial disfigurement. The story is interesting as an experiment in the use of symbol, but it lacks the subtlety that Cather achieves in her later fiction.

"The Willing Muse" is a story about two writers who marry: Kenneth Gray, who writes rather anemic scholarly novels that cost him a great deal of time and effort, and Bertha Torrance, who turns out two best-sellers every year. Friends hope the marriage will inspire Kenneth to reach his full potential, but his reaction to Bertha's astounding fecundity is a complete inability to write. He is reduced to answering his wife's fan mail until one day he simply can't take it any longer and disappears. Cather again makes use of a male narrator and a very Jamesian minor-character point of view. Bertha Gray may remind readers of Jane Highmore in James's "The Next Time" and Kenneth Gray of Paul Overt in "The Lesson of the Master" or Ray Limbert in "The Next Time."

The last of these four stories, "Eleanor's House," is the most Jamesian of all. It is about a man who is so devoted to the memory of his first wife, Eleanor, that he cannot bear to take his second wife, Ethel, to visit the home created by Eleanor. The main character, Harold Forscythe, is thirty-eight when the story opens. Eleanor has died after ten years of a very happy marriage, and now Harold has remarried; but Ethel has lived for two years in the shadow of Eleanor. She comes to the point where she has to do something and while her husband is away goes to visit Eleanor's house. She finds Harold there stretched out on the bed in Eleanor's boudoir. Ethel's appearance on the scene, however, has the effect of exorcising the dead Eleanor's hold on Harold. The story ends with the couple sailing to America and a new life, leaving the Norman countryside and selling the house to Eleanor's best friend. The story, which is pretty good psychological drama, is told from the point of view of this best friend.

Cather never reprinted any of these stories, regarding them all as bad apples and apprenticework. When F. L. Pattee wanted to anthologize "The Willing Muse" in 1926, she rejected the proposal out of hand. The story, she wrote, was so tepid and bloodless that she would not consider under any circumstances letting it be reprinted. Yet these stories are better than she remembered, and as they appear in her Collected Short Fiction, one can see a steady development in narrative technique and character portrayal. She no doubt did not want to be reminded of her Henry James phase, and of course, she had not yet found her authentic voice.

After Cather had been reading and editing manuscripts for eight months, McClure gave her an important assignment. He had in his files a manuscript he had bought some time before from Georgine Milmine on the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Milmine had collected an enormous amount of interesting-even sensational-material, all meticulously researched, but she was incapable of writing a publishable biography. Because Mrs. Eddy had led a rather bizarre life and was the founder of a religion, the material was potentially explosive. McClure, with his passion for accuracy, had put several of his staff members to work on it. He sent Mark Sullivan to New England to check facts; then he asked Burton Hendricks to rewrite the biography. Hendricks produced the first installment, which McClure's published in January 1907, but McClure wasn't satisfied with it. At that point he turned to Cather and told her to take over. She was to continue checking facts where Sullivan had left off and to finish rewriting the manuscript. To do this she went to Boston, moved into the Parker House until she found an apartment on Chestnut Street, traveled about rural New England, and spent most of 1907 and part of 1908 on this assignment.

Leaders of the Church of Christ, Scientist were upset when they learned of McClure's plans to publish this series. Spokesmen for the church visited McClure's office one day and insisted that the articles be suppressed. They were assured that the facts all had been checked carefully, that the series would be perfectly straightforward. When the visitors wanted to see the material in advance of publication, McClure flatly refused. Then they threatened him with a loss in advertising revenue, but McClure went ahead with the publication, and nothing came of the threat. The series was a great success, circulation figures increased, and McClure was delighted with Cather's work. Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science ran in fourteen installments over the next eighteen months.

McClure had not lost his touch. While the Christian Science series was being prepared, McClure's was publishing a serial by Kipling, Carl Schurz's memoirs, and Hendrick's expose of the life insurance industry. While the series was running, the magazine ran fiction by Conrad and began Ellen Terry's memoirs. McClure could find new writers to replace the stars who had left him, but it turned out that he could not get along without John Phillips to manage the business end of the magazine. He had to mortgage his property to buy out his partners and was in financial trouble from then on. Even with a circulation of over half a million the magazine never made a profit after 1906.

For Cather the Christian Science assignment brought her both grief and the managing editorship. She wrote her father in December that she would not be able to come home for Christmas because she had to work on the Christian Science articles. She was bitter about giving up the trip she had planned, but she couldn't desert McClure. He apparently had convinced her that the magazine faced a crisis and persuaded her to work through the holidays getting the March installment ready for publication on time. Otherwise people would think the church had scared him off. The articles, she reported, were under such a glare of publicity and fire of criticism. The following month she wrote Dwight, who was off in Italy, that she was the fourth person to undertake to rewrite Milmine's manuscript and was about to spend the next five months grubbing among newspaper files and court records. This was the most laborious and sordid work she had ever done, and it was taking every bit of her time and as much vitality as she could put into it. It was sapping her brain and wringing it dry. She was jumping about like a squirrel in a cage and wondering how she ever got into it. She never in her life had wanted to do this sort of thing, but there she was hammering away at it. McClure, however, had promised her six months in Europe after she finished the series.

Following publication of the Life in the magazine, Doubleday, Page, and Company brought it out in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. Although Georgine Milmine's name was on the title page both in serial and book form, Cather was the real author of all but the first installment. But the work was so foreign to what she really wanted to write that for the rest of her life, with one exception, she stoutly maintained that all she had done was edit the manuscript. In 1922, however, she felt the need to tell someone the true story and put it in a letter to her old friend Edwin Anderson. But she swore him to silence, and the secret was not divulged until Cather's letter eventually turned up in the archives of the New York Public Library. She ended her letter by saying that Milmine was in the awkward position of having her name on a book of which she did not write a word.

Cather regarded this book as part of her apprenticeship and wanted to forget it, as she did her early stories and her Journalism. She said she wrote it as a sort of discipline, an exercise. It was her first long piece of work, however, and marked another milestone on her way to becoming a novelist. In her essay "The Novel Demeuble she writes that "the novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect." Cather's experience with the life of Mary Baker Eddy was an analogous lesson.

Cather thought that McClure picked her to write the series because she was unprejudiced. She hadn't a bone to pick with Christian Science, she told Anderson. The subject was sensitive, however, as the church in its thirty-year history had grown powerful and Mrs. Eddy's book, Science and Health, was, next to the Bible, the most important book to her followers. In June 1 906 Christian Scientists from all over the world had met in Boston to dedicate "the most costly church building in New England and one of the most pretentious in the United States." By that time there were already six hundred other Christian Science churches and many thousands of adherents. Hot arguments raged, nonetheless, over the sources of Mrs. Eddy's system of healing disease by the mind, whether it was from divine inspiration, as she claimed, or borrowed from Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, who had treated her in the 1860s.

The book that Cather wrote reads like a legal brief. She presented the materials dispassionately, documenting Mrs. Eddy's life every step of the way with hard evidence-letters, court records, sworn affidavits. There is none of the emotional coloring and figurative language that characterizes all of Cather's previous journalism. She not only worked with the data in Milmine's manuscript, but she also collected new material, for a number of the documents are sworn statements dated February 1907, after she went to Boston. Also, because Mrs. Eddy was still living, she added several more years to Milmine's biographical material. The series as a whole is an astonishing performance. McClure's erstwhile star Ida Tarbell could not have done it better, and Cather, had she wanted, could have been as good as any of the magazine's investigative reporters in uncovering political corruption and corporate venality. The New York Times commented editorially after the series began that McClure's was performing a large public service.

If the work of writing the Christian Science series was distasteful and uncongenial, the assignment to Boston was a marvelous stroke of good luck. She was excited about seeing for the first time the literary and historic landmarks of Boston she had read about all her life and traveling through the mountains and towns of rural New England. While Nebraska had only a geologic past, Massachusetts had as much history behind it as her native Virginia. She also discovered the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which drew her back year after year and eventually became her final resting place. The stay in Boston was richly productive of friendships: Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, who became her publisher; Margaret Deland, writer, and Louise Imogen Guiney, poet; Louis Brandeis, future Supreme Court justice, his wife, and her sister Pauline Goldmark, social worker; Laura Hills, painter.

Her most important friendships began, however, one day in February 1908, when she set out to pay a call on Mrs. Brandeis in Otis Place. When she arrived, her hostess said she wanted to take her to visit a very charming old lady, Mrs. James T. Fields, widow of the former Boston publisher, who lived in nearby Charles Street. Together they began what for Cather was to be a moving journey into the past. The famous firm of Ticknor and Fields was a part of literary history, the imprint on some of the books she had read as a child in Red Cloud. That Mrs. Fields could still be living in Boston in 1908 seemed incredible. Her husband had been the friend and publisher of Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Longfellow, an early editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a key figure in New England's golden literary age. Annie Fields was in fact living at 148 Charles Street in the same house where Dickens, Thackeray, Arnold, and a host of other notables had been entertained. She had married young, when Fields was a middle-aged widower, and already had survived her husband by twenty-seven years.

Although Mrs. Fields was over seventy, she did not seem old when Cather was conducted into her drawing room. "Frail, diminished in force, yes; but, emphatically, not old." She was still a cheerful, vital spirit, a woman with a merry, musical laugh, a hostess of consummate skill and grace. In her presence Cather relived literary history. Mrs. Fields had talked to Leigh Hunt about Shelley; she had known Joseph Severn, who had given her a lock of Keats's hair. The house was full of treasures: rare editions, manuscripts of great authors, association copies of books written by her guests. If one did not "go at" her, she would talk of her famous visitors just as though they were people who had dropped in for tea last week. For the first time in her life, Cather later wrote, she felt that Americans had a past of their own, and she went away with an exultant feeling. "It was at tea-time, I used to think, that the great shades were most likely to appear; sometimes they seemed to come up the deeply carpeted stairs, along with living friends. At that hour the long room was dimly lighted, the fire bright, and through the wide windows the sunset was flaming, or softly brooding, upon the Charles River and the Cambridge shore beyond. The ugliness of the world, all possibility of wrenches and jars and wounding contacts, seemed securely shut out."

Cather loved going to that house on Charles Street, and she loved its occupant, though she never quite got over her sense of awe. She also visited Mrs. Fields at her Massachusetts summer place at Manchester and wrote her frequently, but in her letters she was always afraid of touching on one of Mrs. Fields's prejudices and letting the noisy modern world in on her. When DeWolfe Howe disposed of Mrs. Fields's correspondence after her death, Cather insisted that her own letters be destroyed. They were too artificial and unrepresentative, she said. When she was with Mrs. Fields, however, she did not feel constraint, and their relations were natural. She delighted in the sharp contrasts between her world of McClure's Magazine and the surviving bit of the Victorian era on Charles Street. It was delicious to have Mrs. Fields look up from the paper and ask gravely who Rex Beach was and did he have anything to do with letters? Mrs. Fields was the soloist, and she was the accompanist, Cather wrote Howe, and she did not mind learning from her hostess. One day Mrs. Fields quoted a line of poetry: "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone."

"That's very nice," said I, "but I don't recognize it."

"Surely," she said, "that would be Dr. Donne."

"I never pretended to Mrs. Fields," Cather continued, and so she asked brazenly, "And who ... was Dr. Donne?" Mrs. Fields was patient with her ignorance and sent her up to bed with two thick volumes of Donne to read. Despite her omnivorous reading, Cather had many gaps in her knowledge of English literature, and there are no references at all in her years of journalism to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets.

She learned a great deal from Mrs. Fields, not just the anecdotes of literary history or who John Donne was. It was her manner, her complete faith in the great tradition, her life-style, to use the contemporary term, that instructed Cather. She was an exemplary figure, a role model, even though Cather regarded herself as a liberated woman, modern and progressive. When she reviewed Howe's edition of Mrs. Fields's diaries, Memories of a Hostess, in 1922, she quoted a sentence from Aristotle that Mrs. Fields had copied in her diary as a young woman: "Virtue is concerned with action; art with production." The problem of life, she added, was to harmonize the two. In a long life, wrote Cather, "she went far toward working out this problem... . In the patriot, the philanthropist, the statesman, she could forgive abominable taste. In the artist ... she could forgive vanity, sensitiveness, selfishness, indecision, and vacillation of will." Cather too pondered this maxim and tried to reconcile these dichotomies.

When Cather first climbed the stairs to Mrs. Fields's drawing room that memorable day in February 1908, there were two women having tea together, Mrs. Fields and her old friend and sometime companion Sarah Orne Jewett. It was a wonderful surprise to meet Jewett, "who looked very like the youthful picture of herself in the game of 'Authors' I had played as a child, except that she was fuller in figure and a little grey." The friendship with Jewett that began over tea that afternoon lasted only sixteen months, but it was one of Cather's most cherished relationships. Jewett died unexpectedly at the age of sixty; yet in those sixteen months she became one of the most prepotent forces in Cather's literary development. She was, moreover, the first important woman writer Cather knew.

Cather saw her on other occasions at Mrs. Fields's that winter and spring, again when she visited Mrs. Fields in the summer at Manchester, and in the fall at Jewett's home in South Berwick, Maine. She tried to get Jewett to write a story for McClure's, and she promised she would, but her health was precarious and she never managed to do it. Jewett was strongly attracted to Cather and wrote her in August: "I wish that I could see you and that something might bring you to Boston and for a night to Manchester. For more than a night, or as long as you could stay." After Cather's visit to Maine in November, Jewett wrote: "I was sorry to miss the drive to the station and a last talk about the story and other things; but I was too tired.... And I knew that I was disappointing you, besides disappointing and robbing myself " After Jewett's death Cather visited Sarah's sister Mary in South Berwick, and for her Jewett's room and desk became a sort of shrine. Jewett served Cather as an important role model as she struggled to find her authentic voice.

Cather had not begun to appreciate the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, however, until she was an adult. At the age of nineteen, she wrote Alexander Woollcott in 1942,she was not the least interested in Jewett. She found nothing in her stories that she wanted in a book. She was blind alike to their elegance and truthfulness. She was then reading Balzac furiously and every" thing of Tolstoy. Young people, she said, don't care how a thing is done; refinement simply goes over their heads, and form means nothing. By the time The Country of the Pointed Firs came out in 1896 Cather had developed a passion for Jewett's work, and when she edited a collection of Jewett's best stories in the twenties, she ranked The Pointed Firs along with The Scarlet Letter and Huck Finn as one of the three most enduring American classics.

The six months in Europe that McClure promised Cather when she began work on the Christian Science series shrank to four months and was belated. She was able to make a trip back to Red Cloud in the summer of 1907,but the life of Mrs. Eddy took longer to complete than anyone anticipated. In April 1908, however, Cather and McClung again sailed for Europe, this time going directly to Italy. They spent a week in Tuscany and visited Rome, Naples, Pompeii, and the Amalfi coast on the Gulf of Salerno. Cather responded to this first trip to Italy with intense delight. Her letters are rhapsodies to the beauty of the land and the grandeur of the antiquities.

After reaching Naples, she wrote Mrs. Goudy, her old teacher, about her first couple of weeks in Italy. She and McClung had tramped about the Apennines visiting old monasteries. In one lonely sanctuary high on a mountaintop they found a single monk living amid the ruins, who showed them wonderful Latin manuscripts in his crumbling library. On another day they found an original code of the Lombard League in a Benedictine abbey that had been founded in the eleventh century. Then the two women moved on to Naples and Pompeii, which were more wonderful than anyone could imagine. They spent two days amid the ruins of that buried city before returning to Naples to look at the art treasures in the museums there. Naples itself was a marvel, and their hotel overlooked the bay, which Cather thought the most beautiful body of water in the world. She was sitting on her balcony every afternoon and watching Mt. Vesuvius change from violet to lilac to purple. She could almost throw a stone to the tiny island of Megaris where Lucullus once had his garden and where Brutus met Cicero after the murder of Caesar.

Street singers sang under her window every night, and every morning she went to the flower market to buy roses and camellias.

She was captivated by the Roman sculpture in the Royal Museum. It was full of royal Roman families in youth and in age, and she felt as if she had known them all personally. She was brushing up on her Latin and reading Tacitus and Seutonius. They also had been going about in the country looking at vineyards and fields in bloom. The vines were in new leaf-, oranges and lemons were ripe; peach and cherry trees were blooming. The olive trees above the Mediterranean were soft and gray, and all the country folk were out digging in their fields, just as Virgil described it in the Georgics. Such a ravishing world, she concluded, and such a short life to see it in!

One week later she was writing Jewett from the Hotel and Pension Palumbo in Ravello overlooking the Mediterranean high above Amalfi. The camellias were in bloom in the Rufolo Garden, and the hotel was covered with yellow roses. She had a room facing the sea. Apparently Jewett had once stayed in the same hotel, for Cather refreshed her memory of the breathtaking view. The land dropping down to the sea looked like hot green porcelain whose flow had been checked by the jagged cliffs along which ran the Salerno road. It was surely a sea of legend, a sea that glimmered centuries away with the opaque blue water that Puvis de Chavannes painted. The day before there had been a religious festival in Amalfi, and she had started out gaily in the company of Italians along the footpath leading down to the town. just as the path came out on an open place along the carriage road, a group of Nebraskans she had not seen for years came into sight. There was nothing she could do but go back to Ravello with them and leave her Italian companions and the fiesta.

The Italian interlude ended all too soon, and Cather was back at her desk by August 6. She later told people that she had become managing editor about this time, but she never listed herself as more than an associate editor in her Who's Who entries. McClure's biographer believes she shared the duties of managing editor with George Turner, but he was off on roving assignments much of the time, while Cather remained in the office doing the work. In actual fact McClure was his own managing editor as well as editor-in-chief, and the person or persons who sat on the editorial desk were merely expected to handle routine editorial correspondence, dispose of would-be contributors who insisted on calling in person, recognize any new talent that swam into view, and keep McClure informed of what was going on. But McClure himself also spent much of his time traveling so that whoever was in the office did the work of putting out the magazine.

Cather also was able to get along with McClure better than anyone else. They had their common Western background as a bond, also their mutual interest in romance and writers like Kipling and Stevenson. Sergeant, who saw them both in action in 1910 reported: "Clearly the two of them were partners in an alliance that had tang and motion. Their Midwest voices harmonized, their seething inner forces supplemented each other. There was an inspirational quality about the dynamic unspoiled assistant that kept the older editor afloat on his sea of discovery."

Every editor who worked for McClure had the unofficial job of trying to keep the chief from going off half-cocked. Cather said later that she spent a lot of her energy helping the magazine wriggle out of commitments McClure had made to writers and their agents. She didn't have enough help in this duty, however, and was unable to prevent McClure's ultimate downfall. When he had Tarbell, Phillips, and Steffens with him, the three of them could hold him down, but they had been with him for a long time and knew how to do it. The newer employees like Cather didn't have the experience. Will Irwin, who was managing editor for a year after the blow-up, remembered: "As a curb on genius, I was not a success."

Cather made a significant change in her living arrangements after her return home from Europe. She and Edith Lewis took an apartment together at 82 Washington Place and began a relationship that lasted until Cather died thirty-nine years later. The two women had met in 1903 when Lewis was visiting her family in Lincoln after graduating from Smith. She then had gone to New York to seek her fortune in the publishing business, and Cather had visited her there several times. When Cather went to work for McClure's, she helped Lewis get a job as proofreader on the magazine. They had lived as neighbors at 60 South Washington Square, and when Cather was working on the Christian Science articles, the magazine had sent Lewis to Boston with proof Now they were to be permanent apartment-mates. The relationship was a close, loving friendship that survived the vicissitudes of nearly four decades.

The close bond between Cather and Lewis has been described as a marriage, but that term is misleading and suggests more than the evidence warrants. Isabelle McClung always remained number one in Cather's affections, even after she married in 19 16. Lewis, however, was devoted to Cather and spent her life smoothing the way and protecting the privacy of her more gifted friend. Sergeant wrote of the relationship: "A captain, as Will White of Emporia said ... must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows about to steer the boat through rocks and reefs." Lewis was the one who bought the railroad tickets, made the hotel reservations (usually in her own name to avoid publicity), acted as traveling companion when she could get away from her job, and in general was Cather's "stand in." The arrangement worked out very well, and the two women lived together harmoniously and comfortably. Lewis, however, had her own career, first as copy reader for McClure's, later a magazine editor, and then an advertising writer for J. Walter Thompson.

The only story that Cather was able to publish in 1 908 was "On the Gull's Road, " which McClure's used in its December issue. It owes its setting to the transatlantic crossing she and McClung had just made in July, and the story might well have been suggested by people encountered during the voyage. There is little action in the story, simply a developing relationship between two characters who spend their days in deck chairs talking as their ship travels from Genoa to New York. Mrs. Ebbling, the Scandinavian wife of the ship's chief engineer, and a young diplomat-artist gradually fall in love. As the young man's love grows, he becomes aware that Mrs. Ebbling is intensely unhappy in her marriage and proposes an elopement. She, however, is suffering from an incurable heart disease and refuses to encumber his life. The admirer is left with bittersweet memories, as he tells the story twenty years later.

A plot summary does not convey the skill of the narration or the subtlety of the character development. Though the influence of James still seems apparent, the story has originality and sentiment without becoming sentimental. There are some good moments in the tale, as Mrs. Ebbling's entrapment in an unhappy marriage and the narrator's growing love are gradually revealed. Cather suggests sexual passion by associating Mrs. Ebbling continually with the sea, as though she were Venus emerging on her scallop, describing her with metaphors of water. To reenforce this image Cather leaves the narrator with a memento from Mrs. Ebbling-a coil of her hair that curls and clings about his sleeve like a living thing and two pink sea shells, both enclosed in a little box.

Cather had doubts about this story when she read proof and sent a copy to Jewett. She was afraid the scent of the tube-rose was still clinging to it and it rather screamed, but her fears that her friend would not like it were unfounded. Jewett read the story with "deep happiness," and it made her feel very near to the writer's "young and loving heart." Mrs. Ebbling was drawn with "unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her." She added: "It makes me the more sure that you are far on your road toward a fine and long story of a very high class." She had one stricture, however; she thought the lover should have been a woman, or the story should have been told in the third person. "The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man's character-it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself-a woman could love her in the same protecting way-a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life. But oh, how close-how tenderhow true the feeling is! the sea air blows through the very letters on the page."

Jewett was responding to what she saw as a technical problem in the narration, but feminist critics see the use of a male narrator here and elsewhere in Cather's fiction as a masquerade, because no magazine would have published a story in 19o8 of a love between two women. The gender of the narrator, however, is almost undetectible, and if the subtitle, "The Ambassador's Story" were dropped and one clause ("I threw my cigar away") cut, no one could identify the sex of the anonymous first-person narrator. In fact, one sentence reads: "I returned to the deck and joined a group of my countrywomen." But Cather certainly intended the narrator to be male and never paid any attention to critics who thought she should write more like a woman. She had been writing from a male point of view from the beginning and had begun her adolescence in the role of William Cather, M. D. If anyone had charged her with a deliberate masquerade, she would have denied it indignantly and defended her male point of view on aesthetic grounds.

Jewett was not satisfied with the letter she had written about "On the Gull's Road." She thought about the story and her young friend for the next two weeks and then wrote a long second letter which really said what was on her mind. She saw enough potential in Cather that she felt obliged to level with her. "I cannot help saying what I think, " she began, "about your writing and its being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now." She thought it impossible for her to be a magazine editor and at the same time have her writing talent mature properly. Although The Troll Garden contained some good work, especially "The Sculptor's Funeral," "you are older now than that book ... 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."

Then she went on to review Cather's background and career to date. "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 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." Cather also had had a good education, which was essential and important to her, but at this point in her career (age thirty-five) she needed a quiet place to write. "Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world ... in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up." Otherwise, she added, what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, what might be insight is only observation, and what might be sentiment is only sentimentality. "You can write about life, but never write life itself And to write and work on this level, we must live on it."

This remarkable letter from an old writer to a young one touched Cather deeply. She responded with an eight-page reply a day or two after receiving it. In her answer she analyzed herself, her prospects, her ambitions,. her talents, more profoundly perhaps than ever before. The letter is very revealing of her state of mind thirty-three months after joining McClure's staff. She admitted that she was deeply perplexed about her life. She was not made to have to do with what McClure called "men and measures." In order to get on with that kind of work, she had to go at it with the sort of energy most people had to exert only on rare occasions. Consequently, she was living from day to day much like a trapeze performer on the bar. It was catch the right bar at the right time or onto the net you go. Her mind was off doing trapeze work all day and only came back to her at night dog tired and wanting to sleep.

Then the reading of so many poorly written manuscripts had a deadening effect. She knew that some people could do it, but it gave her a kind of dread of everything made out of words. She felt diluted and weakened by it all the time as though she were in a tepid bath and could no longer stand heat or cold. She often thought of trying to get three or four months a year of free time to write, but then the planning of articles for the magazine was pretty much in her head, and it was difficult to hand the details over to anyone else. Her mind had become a sort of card catalogue of notes meaningless except to her. What McClure wanted to do was to make her into as good an imitation of Ida Tarbell as he could. He wanted her to write articles on popular science and other things for half of each week and attend to the office work in the other half. That combination would be perfectly possible, she feared, but quite deadening. He wanted above all things good, clear-cut journalism. She did not despise such writing, but she got no satisfaction out of it.

It seems clear from this letter that McClure was engaged in brainwashing. She said he kept telling her that she would never be able to do much in writing stories, but she could be a good magazine executive and had better let it go at that. She often thought that he probably was right. If she had been making any progress during the past five years, it was progress of the head and not of the hand. At her age she ought to have some sureness in her pen and some facility in turning out a story. In other matters-things about the office-she could usually do what she set out to do, and she could learn by experience; but when it came to writing she was a new-born baby every time. She always came into it naked and shivering and without any bones. She never seemed to learn anything about it at all.

She thought one had a right to live and reflect and feel a little. When she was teaching she did. She learned more or less all the time, but now she had the feeling of standing still except for a certain kind of facility in getting the sort of material McClure wanted. This was stiff mental exercise, but it was about as much food to live by as elaborate mental arithmetic. Of course, there were interesting people and interesting things in the day's work, but it was all like going around the world in a train and never getting off to see anything close up. She did not have a reportorial mind, couldn't get things in fleeting glimpses, and the excitement did not stimulate her; it only wore her out. It did to her brain exactly what she had seen alcohol do to men's. It spread out their brain cells so that they didn't touch, and everything leaked out, as power did in a broken circuit.

Whether or not McClure was right in thinking she would never be a writer, she thought perhaps she ought to consider her immortal soul. He thrived on the perpetual debauch of editorial work, but five years more would make her fat, sour, ill-tempered and-worst of all-fussy. She added that she was still sending money home now and then, but if she stopped working the following summer, she would have savings enough to live very simply for three or four years, which would give her time to pull herself together. Since she was fifteen she had never had six months free in a stretch. It was foolish to lose one's real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase or the stock exchange.

When Jewett warned Cather that she needed a quiet center for her life or her writing would not improve, she obviously touched a raw nerve. One wonders why Cather did not take this advice and get out of McClure's office. The answer must lie in the hypnotic influence McClure had on her, the attractions of New York, the things a very good salary could buy, the satisfaction of having fought her way to the top, and the genuine self-doubts that this letter reveals. She concluded her letter by observing that she must have something like a split personality.

The work of managing editor took its toll physically as well as mentally. She quoted Jewett a couplet from Goldsmith:

She was much too severe, however, in her self-analysis. In her previous letter to Jewett enclosing a copy of "On the Gull's Road" she said she had finished a western story her friend might like better. McClure had sniffed at it, said it was all introduction, and apparently did not want to publish it, but she had made use of her Nebraska memories and felt the tale had merit. It did indeed: It was "The Enchanted Bluff," the tale that evokes her memories of her brothers and camping on Far Island. It is as good as anything she had done up to that time, and Harper's liked it and published it the next April. A rich evocation of her adolescence in Red Cloud, it foreshadows very directly her mainstream fiction. It uses the same setting as "The Treasure of Far Island," making use of memories of camping on an island in the Republican River, but this time Cather realized she did not need any formal plot structure. The story merely brings together six boys who talk around a campfire on an island the night before the narrator leaves home to begin teaching school on the Divide. It introduces the legend of Coronado and the Spaniards on the Great Plains, which recurs in My Antonia; the symbol of the rock, which appears in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock; and the Southwest, which fired Cather's imagination long before she ever visited the area.

As in "On the Gull's Road," she created a male narrator, and again the story is told twenty years after the fact. As the boys sit about their fire, one of them tells the legend of the Enchanted Bluff in far-off New Mexico, the story of a lost Indian village on top of an inaccessible rock in the midst of the desert. All the boys resolve someday to climb that rock. When morning comes, the boys disperse and in the years between the time of the story and the telling of it, they all go off into prosaic adult occupations. The narrator ends the tale reminiscing about their youthful dreams and aspirations. The prose in the story is vintage Cather, as it opens: "We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of the ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The Western shore was low and level, with corn fields that stretched to the skyline, and all along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered."

There is no doubt that McClure appreciated Cather's work and rewarded her generously. "I have been greatly pleased with your letters and your work," and "I am awfully proud of your splendid work," he would write when she was out of town on magazine business. He had another way of holding on to her, perhaps even more effective than praise. He sent her to Europe in May 1909 on a trip to hunt for writers and manuscripts. He believed in frequent trips to Europe and elsewhere and thought a roving editor was more likely to discover talent than a sedentary one. When he hired Lincoln Steffens, he told him he had to learn to be an editor.

"How can I learn?" Steffens asked him. "He laid his hand on my knee. 'Not here,' he said. 'You can't learn to edit a magazine here in this office.'

    "Where then can I learn? Where shall I go to learn to be an editor?

    "He sprang up and waved his hand around a wide circle.

    'Anywhere,' he said. 'Anywhere else. Get out of here, travel, go-someplace.'" Steffens took a train for Chicago and began his distinguished career as magazine writer and editor.

Cather was in England for two months on this scouting trip. She went to hear Vera Figner, a Russian political prisoner who had been released after twenty-two years of mostly solitary confinement in the dread Schlusselburg Prison on an island in the Neva River near St. Petersburg. From this lecture came a series of articles by David Soskice, The Secrets of the Schlusselburg, for which she wrote the introduction. She also met interesting theatrical and literary people, one of whom was William Archer, drama critic, writer, and contributor to McClure's. He took her to the funeral of George Meredith and to the first London performance of the Abbey Theater. They sat with Lady Gregory in Yeats' box and saw Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. One Irish actress became the model later for a character in her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. She also met H. G. Wells, Ford Maddox Ford (then Ford Maddox Hueffer), Edmund Gosse, and Katherine Tynan, Irish poet and novelist.

This trip made a lasting impression, especially the association with Archer, whom she saw on subsequent occasions when he visited New York. She recalled another performance of the Abbey Theater that she also saw with Archer in a letter to her biographer E. K. Brown. This was a second play by Synge, the one-act Rising of the Moon, which puzzled the audience a good deal, including Cather. At supper after the performance Archer asked her what she thought of the play. She replied that it was interesting but not very dramatic. He responded gently that anything interesting in theater belongs there and is dramatic. Recalling this incident, she thought she had learned something important from Archer. All at once he had struck out a foolish platitude she had previously respected devotedly. Archer's idea became a principle she applied to her own best work.

While she was in London, she received the devastating news that Sarah Orne Jewett had died. She heard the news on Saturday, June 26, and immediately wrote Mrs. Fields a letter of sympathy and an expression of her own grief. She was overcome by the fact, and as she went about feeling numb and inert she realized that everything she had been doing in London was in hopes of interesting Jewett. She was even having clothes made that she hoped her friend would like. Now all the wheels were standing still and the ways of life seemed dark and purposeless. The day after she wrote a letter came from Mrs. Fields in an effort to soften the blow. Cather was deeply touched by her kindness, as she wrote Mrs. Fields from her ship the day she reached New York, July 13.

There was no time to grieve. As soon as the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse docked, she had to get back to the office. For the next twenty months she was chained to her editorial desk most of the time. She did manage six weeks in Nebraska in September and October, but McClure spent a great deal of time in Europe leaving her to run the magazine alone-. The year before, he had gone abroad the day after she landed from Italy; he simply could not sit still. By Christmas she was so tired that she went to bed for the holidays. Fortunately she had Isabelle McClung with her for November and December, she wrote Aunt Franc, and that was a comfort, especially at Christmas, which always was a homesick time for her. McClung also had been shopping for her and had trained a new maid. Meantime, Cather still was doing her trapeze act at the office. She had commissioned an article on the Cherry Mine disaster and was keeping an eye on a grand jury investigation resulting from a McClure'sarticle on Tammany Hall and white slavery. Later in the spring she went up to Boston to talk to Hugo Munsterberg, a Harvard psychologist, about a series of articles he would write during a forthcoming trip to Germany.

McClure's did well under Cather's stewardship. During the first year of her managing editorship the circulation rose by sixty thousand, and in the second the figures were even better. In June 1910 a special announcement stated that three issues had gone out of print in the past year and the current number was the largest in the magazine's history. McClure was still so much in debt, however, that the company was not making a profit. The articles and stories that McClure's published in this period are pretty much of a piece with the material used in previous years. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, then very popular, was the serialized novelist, and Cather bought fiction from Arnold Bennett, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. She also accepted stories from Rex Beach, whose work she usually disparaged, and three tales from Kathleen Norris in six months. Nonfiction articles included muckraking pieces by Turner, a series on Grover Cleveland, and work by Jane Addams. William Archer wrote on the theater, and there were more reminiscences by Ellen Terry. One day she bought an article on the sweated workers in the garment industry from a brisk young woman from Boston and Bryn Mawr.

This was Elizabeth Sergeant, who walked into McClure's offices with her manuscript and a letter of introduction from Pauline Goldmark. Cather was not much interested in sweatshops, but she liked her visitor immediately and found Sergeant really was more concerned with literature, France, and general culture than with social issues. A friendship developed that was very close for the next two decades. It was never broken off, though the two women did not see each other often after the twenties. Cather's friendshipsand her hates-usually were formed on the basis of instant, intuitive reactions; she knew right away if she wanted to bother with a person, and Sergeant met the test. Cather also did not drop old friends, even when they displeased her; and when Sergeant became an ardent New Dealer in the thirties while Cather remained a staunch Republican, they steered clear of politics.

The editor that Sergeant met in McClure's offices in January, 1910 was a buoyant, rather square woman with no trace of the reforming feminist about her. She shook hands in a direct, almost brusque manner and led her visitor through the jostle of the noisy anterooms to her private office. Her boyish, enthusiastic manner was disarming. Her voice had a western resonance about it that contrasted sharply with Sergeant's Boston accent, and her clothes were informal, as if she rebelled against urban conformities. She wore a bright striped blouse and a loud Irish-tweed skirt that cut her sturdy legs in half During the interview that followed Cather read Sergeant's article, found it sufficiently objective and factual for McClure's and after some cuts and condensation agreed to accept it. Then she changed the subject:

"Tell me . . . why you joined the reforming pamphleteers? This all has its place-it's good-but aren't short stories more in your line? I don't mean tenement stories-you look like a Jamesian-am I right?" Sergeant argued vigorously that society had to protect the exploited immigrant families crowded into lower Manhattan, but before long she was telling Cather about her recent trip to Greece and how she met Anatole France in the Athens museum. This led to Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Jewett; and when Sergeant said she had given a copy of The Country of the Pointed Firs. to a French writer who compared it to Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, there was no doubt  this was going to be a close friendship.

Another lifelong friendship began at McClure's when the future playwright Zoe Akins submitted verse to the magazine. Cather rejected the verse but found the poet a delightful young woman of twenty-three who had come to New York from St. Louis to be a writer. When she sent back the verse, Cather told Akins she ought to try playwriting. She did, and after achieving success with Declassee in 1919 went on to write one successful play after another until she won a Pulitzer Prize in 193 5 Cather and Akins carried on a lifelong correspondence, writing each other warm and affectionate letters several times a year. Although Akins settled in California in the thirties, she came to New York on theater business every year and the two friends always got together. Cather had no hesitation in telling Akins when her plays were bad, but Akins always took the criticism good naturedly. She also had a genius for sending gifts that pleased Cather, such as a blooming apple tree at Christmas, a green jacket to work in, a Chinese nightingale. The only time Cather ever addressed sharp words to this friend was when Akins sent her a dramatized version of A Lost Lady that some young Hollywood writer had made. She wrote in 1936 that Akins was one of her comforts and one of the few people she trusted. On another occasion she wrote that she envied Akins's natural ability to enjoy life and her courage to take chances. When Akins got married for the first time at the age of forty-six, Cather wrote a warm letter of congratulations, wished she were going to California that year so that she could hear all about it. She thought that Akins, if anyone, could make matrimony go. Always for Cather there was a golden glow about this friend.

Besides Sergeant and Akins, there was a widening circle of friends in New York. She no longer found her friends among theater folk, except for George Arliss and his wife, who lived near Washington Place and were frequent guests. She thought his characterization of Disraeli was one of the great .performances of the era, and she enjoyed frequent after-theater parties at his apartment. She developed a close friendship with Viola Roseboro', her colleague at McClure's, and came to know and admire Ida Tarbell, even though the latter had left McClure in the celebrated break. Another friend and neighbor was Mrs. Clara Potter Davidge, who had built E. A. Robinson a studio behind her house at 121 Washington Place. Cather met Robinson there but never bought any of his poems for McClure's.

Cather also got to know Mark Twain during his last years when he lived at 21 Fifth Avenue not far from Washington Square. He spent a good deal of time in bed in those years and entertained three or four young people at a time, including Cather on occasion, in his bedroom. Cather recalled these sessions when she wrote William Lyon Phelps in 1936 to praise an article he had written on Twain for the Yale Review. She was glad he did not accept Van Wyck Brooks's thesis that Twain was a blighted genius. If he had been the imaginary character Brooks created in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, she said, he never would have written Huck Finn; and if Brooks had ever seen that old lion in bed telling stories, he never could have written his book. Twain, for his part, was much taken with Cather's poem, "The Palatine," when it appeared in McClure's in June 1909 and read it to his secretary, young Albert Bigelow Paine.

For most of 1910 she drudged away on Twenty-third Street while McClure remained away. In July she wrote her former pupil Norman Foerster, then a recent Harvard graduate, that she was editing the magazine all alone and did not expect a vacation until October. She managed to get away at the end of September for two months but was too worn out to go home and only went to New England. McClure returned long enough for her to get her energy back and return to the office, but then he left for Europe once more. Christmas, 1910 however, was a happy occasion. Her younger sister Elsie, whom she was sending to Smith, came to visit, and McClung also was there for a month. The black maid Isabelle had trained the year before was Cather's chief treasure, and the little apartment ran like clockwork. She wrote Aunt Franc on February 22 that her health had been much better than the previous winter.

She spoke too soon, however, for almost immediately she woke up in the night with an agonizing earache. After pacing the floor in increasing pain, she and Lewis got dressed and went to see the only doctor they knew, whose home and office were uptown. There were no cabs available; so they took a streetcar. At the doctor's home they stood a long time on the doorstep ringing the bell before lights appeared in an upper window. The doctor diagnosed the case as acute mastoiditis and sent Cather to the hospital where she was operated on and remained for several weeks. Before she was fully recovered, Lewis remembered, Cather went back to London on magazine business. Although she wrote Aunt Franc that she might have to go to London in April, there are no contemporary records documenting this trip. If she did make the journey, she could not have been gone much more than a month, for she was back in the office in early May.

At the end of the month she went to Boston on business and spent a very pleasant week with Mrs. Fields, one of her best visits. She was in good spirits when she described the visit to Louise Guiney. Mrs. Fields, then seventy-six, had come down to the South Station to meet her, the first time in years she had been there. The charm of the house at 148 Charles Street was never so potent. That other rare spirit , Jewett, seemed not far away, and the house was full of her things. A lift had been installed for Mrs. Fields, and Cather wrote that she had become an expert elevator boy. If she failed as managing editor, she told Guiney, she always could get a job as an elevator operator.

The euphoria revealed in this letter lasted into the summer. She had fully recovered from the mastoid infection of the winter, and though she did not yet know it, her years of editing McClure's Magazine were about to end. Several weeks after returning to New York from Boston, she went back to New England to visit Mary Jewett at South Berwick. She wrote Sergeant that she was saluting her from Sarah Orne Jewett's desk where it all happened. There she could rest perfectly and forget the facts that confront oneRex Beach, the white slave trade, and all the overwhelming vulgarity in which we all live. Never was a home so pervaded by a presence, she concluded. The visit must have inspired her, for by this time she was at work on her first novel, a three-part serial that she finished by the end of the summer. She also was writing a Nebraska story, "The joy of Nellie Dean." McClure's would publish the novel early the next year, and the Century would take the story.

Her last three months of editing the magazine were a grind. The summer was hot and she had to stay in the city. When she wrote Harrison Dwight turning down a poem that was too long for McClure's,she reported that she would be leaving on September 28 for a six month vacation. As it turned out, these six months stretched into fifteen months, and she never again was in the office for more than brief periods. About the time her extended vacation was to begin, the magazine reached another moment of crisis, and this time Cather was one of those who departed-not for another editorial job but for a career as a free lance.

The new life was precipitated by a financial reorganization of the McClure Company. The "chief" finally had gotten himself into such a financial tangle that his son-in-law Cameron Mackenzie had to raise outside capital. The outcome was a reorganization in which McClure lost control of his empire. He signed a contract for the lease of his magazine with an option to buy. The contract provided that he was to be retained as editor-in-chief, at least outwardly, but as Curtis Brady, the business manager, Iater said: "What was going to happen ... was so clear a blind man could have felt it with his cane." At this juncture both Brady and Cather resigned their positions, and Mackenzie, who moved over from the business office, and Frederick Collins, editor of the Woman's Home Companion and one of the reorganizers, took over the real editorial reins. The next year McClure was ousted from his position by the new owners-unhorsed after twenty years as founder, editor, and guiding genius. Thus one reorganization whisked Cather from Pittsburgh to New York, and another shake-up pried her loose from the magazine. She did not sever her connection, however, but took a leave of absence and planned to come back as a staff writer rather than as an editor.