Autobiography willa cather foundation

I saw that if I learned my letters fast I would soon be able to get away from the dirty children with whom I had to sit, and pass into the next form, which I did in a few months. From then on my school life was one of unalloyed happiness. My life, the pleasant part of it, has always been made up of interests, and my school was my first live interest.

School lasted six hours a day, fifty weeks of the year, and there was only a half-holiday on Saturdays. I was always a little sad to see Saturday come around, because there were more interesting things to do at school than there were at home. I liked everything about going to school. I liked the teacher and the boys and girls. The girls were taught in classes of their own on the second floor of the building; but we all came and went and played on the road together.

At noon we played in the triangular View Image of Page 38 playground in front of the school, with a little brook running beside it. The boys of our school were all well mannered and likable.

Autobiography willa cather foundation

I do not remember any fights or quarrels. Some of my dearest friends were Catholic children. I love some of those boys to this day. We were all like brothers together. Sometimes I walked to school alone, and sometimes with my young aunt and uncle. I always enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. In winter the fields got soft, but the grass fields and the grass along the hedges stayed green, and there was only an occasional flurry of snow.

Rain we did not mind. The roads were always firm underfoot. Potatoes were planted in March, and spring began early. When the spring flowers came on and the hawthorn hedges bloomed, the walk to school became such a delight that I could scarcely wait to set off in the morning. Children feel such things much more than grown people know. I can remember what pleasure and comfort I took, even then, in every morning looking up and seeing the blue of distant mountains on the horizon.

There was something reassuring to me as a child about that vague line of purple autobiographies willa cather foundation, and I thought it an indispensable feature of horizons. Some years later, on the prairies of Illinois, I learned that it was not, and I used to long for those far-away mountains very bitterly. M Y eagerness to be off to school in the morning was attended by one sad consequence.

I was not a strong child, and always had to be coaxed to eat my breakfast. I was never hungry for it. Eggs were a luxury and we could not afford them, but my father used to have one egg for his breakfast every morning. When he cut the top off his egg to eat it from the shell, I can remember being given that little piece of the white as a special appetizer.

But usually I ate very little for breakfast. After I had set off on the road to school, however, and met other children, and wakened up to the sights and smells of the morning, then I began to feel happy and to get very hungry. With firm resolution I would open the package of oat-cake that was to serve for my school luncheon, and I would nibble a very little of it.

Then I would wrap it up again. But the farther I walked the better I felt, and I would make all sorts of excuses to myself to justify another attack on the oat-cake—such as that it would be pleasanter to eat it under the hawthorn hedge than in the schoolhouse; that disposing of the oat-cake now would give me all the more time for play or study at noon; or—most improbable of all—that very likely at noon I should not be hungry at all!

However I reasoned, I always ate the oatcake, to the last crumb. The same thing happened over and over, every day, for months and years. I was always lunchless and terribly hungry at noon, and I always ate my cake on the way to school again the very next day. I enjoyed my cake, too, unless I let my conscience trouble me too much about the irregularity of my conduct.

The road to school led through a beautiful country; it ran, indeed, among those same pleasant fields of oats and beets and potatoes over which we looked out from our own door. The flax-fields, with their beautiful blossoms, were the prettiest. The linen industry is one of the principal resources of the North of Ireland, and these flax-fields, with their sky-blue flowers, were a conspicuous feature of the landscape.

In August the flax stalks used to lie for weeks in ditches full of water, until the softer matter had rotted away from the fibers. In the spring and summer we passed by great patches of yellow gorse which we called whin bushes. The road led over a fine stone bridge with a single arch, which I always liked to cross, as the stream below it was very clear.

But this bridge had its terrors, too. Just beyond it there was a public house where they kept geese and very fierce ganders that used to come squawking and thrusting out their beaks at us children. We little fellows were very much afraid of them indeed. I used to look forward to those geese with uncomfortable apprehension. The next landmark on the road was a church.

It was not the church we attended; I don't know that I ever saw the inside of it. But it was a fine old stone church, and the church-yard was grown up with dark, luxuriant green bushes; they may have been rhododendrons. Passing this church always gave me a sense of great pleasure. T HE school-room was not quiet, as schools are now. As you approached it you heard a hum of voices.

While one form recited, the other forms studied, many of the boys going over their lessons aloud. Physical punishment was a very live fact in school then. Occasionally a boy was ferruled over the hand, and we believed that if you could manage to put two hairs from your head across your palm before you held out your hand to the ruler, the pain of chastisement would be greatly mitigated.

When a boy was whipped he usually tried to stuff cloth or paper in the seat of his trousers. The most interesting thing about school, however, was lessons. We were exceedingly well taught. The National School system was then, as it is now, one of the best in the world. View Image of Page 39 Every few years each teacher in the public schools was required to spend six months in Dublin, freshening up his knowledge and receiving instruction in new methods of education.

I can remember when our teacher, Mr. Boyd, went, and how none of us cared much for the substitute who took his place during his absence. Arithmetic and history were the branches liked best. Working out examples was like MR. For a long while I was convinced that long division was the most exciting exercise a boy could find. I got up at six o'clock every morning to study my lessons.

I remember that I once got up at half-past two o'clock by mistake, and it did not seem worth while to go back to bed again. I studied right on until breakfast-time. I can not remember a day when I did not want to go to school. But I used to hate to come home. It seemed dull to come back to the house and sit down to some fried potatoes that were usually a little too greasy.

My feeling of the excitement and importance of the day, and of my part in it, seemed to die down as soon as I came into the doorway. I never got over that feeling. At college everything went well with me until Friday night, and then a blank stretched before me. It always seemed a hard pull until Monday. I was never able to lay aside the interests and occupations of my life with any pleasure, and I have always experienced a sense of dreariness on going into houses where one was supposed to leave them outside.

I have never been able to have one set of interests to work with and another set to play with. This is my misfortune, but it is true. I FOUND it very hard to get books enough to read, particularly as I could never get any pleasure out of reading a book the second time. Besides that, we had at home only Fox's "Book of Martyrs" and the Bible. I remember feeling very much depressed when I finished the historical books of the Old Testament, because then the last of those exciting stories was over for me.

I think I liked these Old Testament stories better than any others. They took the place of books of adventure to me. I remember, too, reading one of the Gospels through several times, and each time hoping that Jesus would get away from his enemies. Several times a year a big box of new schoolbooks from Dublin was left at our school. The readers contained excellent reading matter, and until I had read them through the new ones were a treasure.

My father and mother had once been Presbyterians, but in a revival swept over the northern part of Ireland, and they were converted to the new sect, which had no name and which strove to return to the simple teachings of the early church and to use the New Testament as a book of conduct, abolishing every sort of form. These believers had no houses of worship.

I found an unrented room in the dormitory building, perfectly empty except for a box. In this room I studied that first month, and there I ate my meals, keeping my autobiographies willa cather foundation hidden under the box. I've forgotten how I arranged for a place to sleep. At the end of a month I got a place with J. Stewart, then mayor of Galesburg, to work for my board.

I lived in his house for "I earned extra money for books by sawing wood about town" the rest of the year, and was in every way treated like a son. I earned extra money for books and pocket-money by sawing wood about town. During the winter my mother sent me money enough to buy a suit of clothes to replace my home-made suit, which was half worn View Image of Page 96 out when I left the farm.

Beyond this I had no outside help at all; and at the end of the school year I had made my own way, and had six dollars left. Of course, I knew that I would have to work in vacation; so, when examinations were over, before the Commencement exercies, I got on the train and rode to Wataga. There I struck off into the farming country, picking my way along the sod beside the muddy roads.

I worked all that summer as a farm-hand. The first job I got was grubbing out a locust grove. I grew very lonesome at this kind of work, and asked the farmer, after several weeks, whether I couldn't work overtime for a few days and then get half a day off to go to town. He told me that there was no way of making up time on his place—that all my time was paid for, and so there wasn't any overtime.

This was true of farm-hands in general then; a man had no time that he could call his own. When I got the locusts grubbed out, the farmer passed me on to his son-in-law. Here, besides doing the chores and milking, I plowed all day. That plowing was a little different from any I have ever done. This young farmer had a most remarkable team of horses.

They were so strong and full of spirit that they would trot in the plow. I could not hold them back. So every day we plowed three acres instead of two, the amount a man usually plowed in a day. Any farmer will realize that this was pretty hard work. I used to get up in the morning so stiff and sore that I could scarcely walk from the house to the barn, harness my horses, and then off on the trot.

In the field I soon got limbered up, but by night I was a tired boy. I got the usual wages of a farm-hand at that time, twenty dollars a month. Toward the end of the summer, before the college term opened, I went back to Indiana to visit my mother, and stayed with her for a few days. On my way back to Galesburg I had to spend a few hours in Chicago.

Walking along the street, I stopped before a cheap clothing store and looked at some suits of clothes that were displayed in the window. The proprietor came out and simply worked a suit of clothes off on me. I did now know how to resist his importunities, and to buy the clothes seemed the only way of escape. I paid twenty dollars for the suit, and it wore out in a few months.

That unwise purchase helped to put me behind in funds. Before Thanksgiving my money was all gone, and I saw that I would have to leave school until I could make some more. I got a country school near Dwight, Illinois, and went to teaching about Thanksgiving time. There I was marooned in a perfectly flat prairie country, a most depressing sight in winter.

Illinois roads are proverbially bad in winter, but that season there was a rainfall even heavier than usual. The whole country was like a sponge and the roads were simply impassable. The school term lasted only four months, but after three months I simply had to throw up the job. I couldn't stand the dullness and the flatness and the wetness of the country any longer.

When I got back to Galesburg, it seemed the finest place in the world. I had kept up my studies in my absence, and now went on with my class. A word about the college curriculum. Four-fifths of the students at Knox then took the old-fashioned classical course, in which Greek was obligatory. This course still seems to me the soundest preparation a young man can have, and I still feel that Greek was the most important of my studies.

During the years that he reads and studies Greek a boy gets certain standars that he uses all the rest of his life, long after he has forgotten grammar and vocabular. I enjoyed Greek and mathematics more than any other subjects I took at college, and Homer more than anything else we read in Greek. After I began Homer, I used always to give four hours to the preparation of the next day's lesson, my best study hours, too—from six to ten in the evening.

I looked forward to those hours all day. I went so far as to write out a vocabulary of the first book of Homer, giving, with the help of Liddell and Scott and Curtius' Etymological Dictionary, the Latin, German, and English equivalent of each word. This exercise made the succeeding books easy reading. Of college life, in the sense in which it is now used, there was then none at Knox.

There were no fraternities, no organized athletics, no student dances, no concerts, no students' orchestra or glee club. All the students were earnest, and most of them had had a hard time getting there. A boy's standing among the other boys depended entirely upon his scholarship, and every one did his best. McClure entered college. He was generally recognized as the most accomplished scholar in the faculty, and one of the greatest natural teachers the country then possessed.

McClure afterward married his daughter Harriet View Image of Page 98 "I found an unrented room in the dormitory, perfectly empty except for a box. In this room I studied, and there I ate my meals, keeping my supplies under the box. The first month I lived on bread and grapes" We were allowed to take only three college studies at a time, and we had three one-hour recitations a day.

There was no sense of drive or hurry. On the contrary, one felt that Knox College was a place set apart for boys to grow strong and to develop in mind and body. One felt no pull of the world there, but a kind of monastic calm. In seven years I scarcely read a newspaper. Professor Churchill was at the head of the Preparatory School, and it was he who took the green boys that came in from the farms and directed their efforts.

He had such a love for humankind in general, and for boys in particular, that he could awaken ambition in the dullest and give confidence to the shyest. He became the friend and encourager and insprier of the boys in their first and hardest years at school. Professor Comstock was at the head of the department of mathematics, and his scholarhsip was much respected among the boys.

Professor Hurd was nominally head of the Latin department, but he taught other subjects as well. He was generally recognized as the most accomplished scholar in the faculty, and as one of the greatest natural teachers the country then possessed. There are never too many of these at any time. By the time I finished my second preparatory year, my mother had sold the farm for between three and four thousand dollars, and, as all of her boys were pretty well able to take care of themselves, she decided to go home to Ireland to visit her people.

As I was the oldest son, she took me with her. We left Galesburg on June 6, There we stayed for some days with relatives, and went to the exposition. As I remember the exposition, the telephone exhibit, which was certainly the most important thing there, attracted little or no attention, while people crowded around the butter statue and things of a like nature.

When we reached Liverpool, we found a lodging-house where we got lodgings for ninepence a night. After we were rested from the autobiography willa cather foundation we took a boat for Belfast—always a most disagreeable passage—and from Belfast we took the train to Glarryford. I had left Ireland when I was nine years old, and I was now nineteen.

Nineteen is a fine age, and Ireland is a fine country. I have never forgotten that ride from Belfast to Glarryford. It was a beautifual day late in June, with brilliant sunshine and a sky intensely blue, and everhwere the wonderful green of Ireland, like no other green in the world. I could see, as it were, the cleanness of the grass, washed by so many rains.

The whole countryside presented the look of neatness and tidiness that I had always missed in Indiana and Illinois. THe whie houses, plastered and graveled outside and then whiteashed, glistened in the sunshine, and the rose bsuhes were eveywhere in blook about the doors. The name of the new publication bothered me not a little.

I thought of calling it the New Magazinethe Galaxyor Elysium. I had begun to see that there was not much further growth to be hoped for in the syndicate. We had important rivals by this time, and they cut down our autobiographies willa cather foundation. The only practical expansion was in the direction of a magazine. In spite of our small capital, I thought I could make a magazine go.

In place of capital, we had a great fund of material to draw from. The magazine at first was to be made entirely of reprints of the most successful stories and articles that had been used in the syndicate. We had then about two thousand short stories in the safe to draw from, and I meant to reprint only the best of them. It was clear to me that for the first year or two the staff of the new magazine would have to live on the profits of the syndicate.

If we paid the salaries out of the returns from the syndicate, and cut the cost of the material we printed by using reprint matter almost altogether, I thought the new publication might be made to pay for its own paper and printing. Consequently we had to arrange as big a year as possible for the syndicate. Early in I went abroad to get the best material for the syndicate that I could find in England, and Mr.

Phillips did the same in this country. We made contracts with writers many times in excess of our entire capital. I read 'The Prisoner of Zenda' on my way across the Atlantic, and as soon as I got to New York I cabled Hawkins to send me all the manuscripts he had" tween the Atlantic and Pacific, placing the new syndicate material. I had watched his remarkable work there for some years, and I believed that he was the one man I knew who could become advertising manager of the new magazine.

Just before the first number of McClure's came out, I was in the West, pushing the syndicate for all it was worth. I was sitting in the office of my friend Mr. Nixon, editor of the Chicago Inter-Oceanone day, when a telegram was handed me. It was from Mr. Phillips, and asked me to collect from Inter-Ocean for last month's syndicate service. I tore the telegram into small bits and dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

Later I remarked casually that if it were convenient I should like a check for the last month's service. Nixon smiled. He pointed to the window, and I looked out. Down below I saw a crowd in the street, masses of people seething from curb to curb before a building. The building was a bank. That was the first I saw of the panic of And the first number of the new magazine was not yet off the presses!

Phillips, in New York, had seen what was coming, and had wired me to get hold of any money I could. But there was none to get. The ordinary sources of money were frozen. That panic was like no other panic of recent years. It was largely a result of the Sherman Act for the compulsory coinage of a fixed amount of silver, which had been passed some years before and had resulted in a general hoarding of gold as against silver money.

If you had a great deal of money in the banks, you could draw out only a small portion of it. Wherever money was, there it stuck; the flood of currency was actually congealed. We could not collect from the newspapers that owed us; indeed, we were glad enough to wait for our money, if only we could keep their patronage. As soon as the newspapers felt the pinch of the panic, they began to cut down expenses, and our syndicate service was one of the first things they could dispense with.

One paper after another wrote us to say that View Image of Page 87 they would have to discontinue taking syndicate matter. Every discontinuance meant a net loss to us of from twenty to seventy dollars a week. Before we had got over the shock caused by the loss of one of our best customers, another letter would come saying, "No more syndicate matter until times are better.

One of the articles in the first number of the magazine was a popular science article on evolution—"Where Man Got His Ears," by Professor Henry Drummond. Professor Drummond was then in Boston, delivering the Lowell Lectures. I usually forgot my financial anxieties, even when we were in the direst straits, in the pleasure I always got out of the editorial end of my work—hunting new ideas and new writers, and, as it were, introducing them to each other.

So, before the first number of the magazine was out, I went to Boston to see Professor Drummond, to arrange with him for further popular science articles for the magazine. I had first met him in the early days of the syndicate, when he had delivered at Columbia a lecture on his explorations in tropical Africa, incidental to his study of the slave trade there.

Later we became well acquainted, and I visited him in Glasgow. When I saw Professor Drummond in Boston, I did not say anything about my own financial anxieties, but we spoke of the panic. He told me that his Lowell Lectures on "The Descent of Man" had been very successful, and that the hall had been so crowded that he had been forced to give each lecture twice.

He had therefore received a good deal more than the usual fee. He asked me whether I happened to need any money. I thought he meant for immediate personal expenses, and, thanking him, told him I did not. And yet, he was as obscure to the world as any other young man who might have come out of the East with a bag of manuscripts. Nobody had any idea that he was to be one of the great figures in English literature" View Image of Page 88 as well let me have his check from the Lowell Institute, which was for that amount.

It seemed curious that, when all ordinary springs of money were dry, money should have come from a source that a financier would hardly have thought of. But the money stringency did not relax. I had to get more funds to get out the fourth and fifth numbers. I was lucky enough to buy for two hundred and fifty dollars a new serial novel by an unknown writer that went well in the syndicate and helped us along.

We began to issue McClure's Magazine with fixed charges in excess of all possible returns from the syndicate business. The first number came out at the end of May, We printed 20, copies, and of these 12, were returned to us. The newspaper notices of the new publication, however, were exceedingly cordial and friendly. I believed that we could eventually make the thing go, if only we could keep it alive for a few months.

But how to keep it alive was the question. Small businesses were being wiped out every day. There were weeks when I used to look in the evening paper every night to see whether we were posted in the list of bankrupts. I used to imagine how six issues of the magazine would look if they were stood up in a row, but I was very doubtful as to whether we could ever publish that many.

I ran up to Boston again, and went to my old friend and employer, Colonel Pope. On his advice, I went to Mr. Hollingsworth, and persuaded him to extend me a month's credit on paper. When I returned to New York I got a month's credit from the printer. Houses that had never extended credit before were forced to do so when money was so scarce. Another difficulty arose in the shape of unexpected competition.

Our June number was our first issue. The next month, the Cosmopolitanthen edited by Mr. Lewis's editorial skills probably contributed to Cather's elegant prose style, as the two of them went over her novels together before publication. Cather said O Pioneers! The other [ Alexander's Bridge ] was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time.

She had earlier written a novel called "Fanny" and set in Pittsburgh that never made it into print. The one for which she later won a Pulitzer Prize, One of Ourswas thought by many to be a weaker work. Although it follows its hero, Claude Wheeler, to the battlefields of World War I, she insisted it should not be understood as a war novel and had to be talked out of titling it simply Claude.

Although Cather often drew on her own life in writing her novels, she always--or almost always--disguised her autobiographical presence. She didn't want to write about herself in a direct or obvious way. Yet her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girlends with a memory of hers from her own childhood told in the first person. The memory draws so directly from her own life, in fact, that she told her brother Roscoe, "Without that literal account of something that happened to me when I was between five and six years old, the whole book would be constructednot lived.