'One Has to Follow One's Instinct'

“I think even stupid people like to puzzle over a book. A slight element of mystery is a great asset.” 

Willa Cather respects her readers. I heard a radio interview with a novelist who talked about her latest book as though it were a take-home exam and she was supplying the cheat-sheet. Her book, she implied, was an equation to be balanced and thus exhausted. Good books remain enduring enigmas. Who would presume to have wrung all the meaning out of Death Comes for the Archbishop? Who would want to do so? Besides, a book is not its “meaning” or “message.” I don’t read anything for answers, especially fiction. Books are not puzzles to be solved, even Nabokov’s.

 

Cather is writing to her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, on this date, November 26, in 1931. She refuses to write prefaces to her books:

 

“I’ve thought a good deal about prefaces, Knopf suggested one for a certain book of his, and ‘'ve decided not to write any more prefaces at all. They stimulate a temporary interest and curiosity, but in the long run they are a mistake, for an author still living and still working. I shall leave various comments on some of my books, out of which you can make prefaces after my decease.”

 

Of course, Henry James famously wrote prefaces for the New York Edition of his work, but no one has ever read them as “keys” to unlock the novels and stories. They represent James’ thoughts on the writing of fiction and endure as literature in their own right. “If the writers of various novels I like had written prefaces to them,” Cather writes to Greenslet, “it would rather spoil the books for me.” Cather likewise declined to have her novels repackaged in “school editions” for students – a defense of the autonomy of her work and, by implication, all of literature. She tells Greenslet:

 

“It is too much like selling my own goods. One has to follow one's instinct in these matters, for that is the only guide one has.”