'Tell Me the Most Interesting Things About Life'

The first prerequisite for any writer is an overwhelming interest in his fellows. (The second is an overwhelming interest in his language, but that’s another story.) Such interest comes naturally to our species. Nothing human is alien, and so on. All of us are busybodies, nosy parkers, voyeurs, sticky beaks, eavesdroppers and gossips. Most of us let it go at that and keep our meddling to ourselves. Not so novelists. Much of Henry James’ fiction and Marcel Proust’s is rooted in dinner-party gossip, engaged in and overheard. In 1940, while hospitalized, Willa Cather writes a letter to her friend May Willard. A month earlier she had injured a tendon in her right thumb while signing hundreds of copies of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The pain recurred for the rest of her life – perhaps a symptom of what we know as carpal tunnel syndrome:

“My special nurses are French and Italian and Irish girls, and the superintendent of nurses is a Scotch Presbyterian from Canada! One of my nurses (the one most in attendance on me) is Olympia Fumagalli, the charming Italian girl who accompanied the wife of the former President of Chile, whom the President sent home to Chile on a Government bomber. She spent some weeks in Chile, and can tell me the most interesting things about life on a bomber and about life on a great estate in Chile.”

What impresses me is Cather’s failure to feel sorry for herself or even to spend much time explaining why she’s in the hospital. Instead, she’s curious about the people she meets and intent on telling her friend about them. In her presence, everyone has a story. No one is too inconsequential.

France fell six months earlier and Hitler has conquered much of the rest of Europe. The Blitz rages over Great Britain. Cather says she is buffered from the world’s horrors by her convalescence in the French Hospital, established in New York City by the Société Française de Bienfaisance. On the day she writes her letter, Dec. 30, the well-known photograph of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London having survived a German bombing raid is taken. Cather writes: 

“The Hitler world has been absolutely blotted out for me, and I seem to have been living in the safe and sound and not exaggerated kindliness of beautiful traditions, that are centuries old and will last throughout all time to come.”