These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.
Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.
Afterward, they all went to the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, where the Menuhins were living, for an intimate lunch — just the family, the violinist Sam Franko and Cather, along with her companion, Edith Lewis. “It was a lovely party, with the whole world outside lost in snow,” Cather, the author of American classics like “My Ántonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” wrote to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood. “Inside, perfect harmony!”
This idyll gets a passing mention in Benjamin Taylor’s brisk new biography, “Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather,” though it was one of many in the yearslong friendship of Menuhin and Cather, two titans of 20th-century culture — he a musician and she a writer whose works exude a passion for music.
Their relationship was an unlikely one. Menuhin was a famous child with a busy performance schedule; Cather, several decades older, was in retreat from the modern world and skeptical of celebrity (even her own). Yet across generations and backgrounds, they formed a deep bond. She gave him a literary education, while he fed her love of music. With both of their lives in motion, they were a mutual source of stability and support, whether he was storing his sled in her Park Avenue apartment building or they were leaning on each other through loss, heartbreak and infirmity.
They met when Menuhin was a young teenager, in 1930; both were in Paris and she was introduced to his family by shared friends. Cather was also struck by his younger sisters, writing to her nieces that the girls, Hephzibah and Yaltah, musicians too, were “almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he.”
The next year, back in the United States, Menuhin was on a West Coast tour that coincided with Cather’s visit to her mother in Pasadena, Calif., and the two picked up where they had left off. Cather was so taken with Menuhin that she wanted to dedicate her next novel, “Shadows on the Rock,” to him and his siblings.
A profile of her published that August in The New Yorker — one that described her prose “as surely counterpointed as music” — said that she “picked her intimates with care,” and that “she admires big careers and ambitious, strong characters, especially if they are the careers and characters of women. The most fortunate and most exciting of human beings, to her mind, is a singer with a pure, big voice and unerring musical taste.”
The Menuhin children, instrumentalists born in America to Lithuanian Jews, didn’t fit that bill exactly, but enough for a quickly flourishing relationship. They called Cather Aunt Willa, and she loved them as if they were family. She kept what her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remembered as “a melting, angelic photograph of young Yehudi Menuhin” prominently displayed in her apartment, and frequently crossed Central Park to spend time with him and his sisters at the Ansonia.
In his memoir, “Unfinished Journey,” Menuhin wrote that Cather was “a rock of strength and sweetness,” but also that “her strength had a patience and evenness which did not preclude a certain severity.”
“Her mannish figure and country tweediness, her let’s-lay-it-on-the-table manners and unconcealed blue eyes, her rosy skin and energetic demeanor,” Menuhin wrote, “bespoke a phenomenon as strangely comforting to us all as it was foreign, something in the grain like Christian Temperance or the Girl Scout movement.” (The New Yorker said that she, “in spite of her Irish-Alsatian ancestry, her American upbringing, has a strain of Tartar in her temperament.”)
Cather gave Menuhin books of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and Goethe’s “Faust” in German, and would pick up used copies of Shakespeare plays for him and his sisters. “In our apartment,” Menuhin wrote, “there was a little room, nobody’s property in particular, small enough to be cozy, and furnished with a table around which Aunt Willa, Hephzibah, Yaltah, myself and often Aunt Willa’s companion, Edith Lewis, gathered for Shakespearean readings, each taking several parts, and Aunt Willa commenting on the language and situations in such a way as to draw us into her own pleasure and excitement.”
She was, Menuhin thought, “the embodiment of America — but an America which has long ago disappeared.” Still, with a Henry James-like sensibility, treasuring new-world determination and hope alongside old-world refinement and tradition, she also impressed upon them European values. Through their peripatetic lives they occupied both cultures; and for them, she was a bridge.
Even as Menuhin became an adult and Cather’s writing fixated increasingly on the past, their relationship remained strong. He would send her flowers and orange trees in winter. She would notify friends of his New York concerts and radio broadcasts. They went to “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan Opera, and saw Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen in “Othello” on Broadway. No matter the weather, they enjoyed walks in Central Park; her favorite path took them around the reservoir.
Cather was protective of his reputation. In letters, she reminded people that “anything about my doings with the Menuhins is confidential,” and once wrote, “I scarcely dare whisper any fact or opinion about them for fear of seeing myself quoted in The New York Times.” (She was, beyond this, so private that she didn’t want any of her correspondence, as well as the draft of her unfinished final novel, to survive her death.)
When Menuhin was navigating young love, Cather was a font of advice — “I always have your future very much at heart,” she told him in one letter — and gushed over his marriage to Nola Nicholas. “No artist ever made such a fortunate marriage,” Cather wrote to her friend Zoë Akins. “Yehudi loves goodness more than anything, (I mean beautiful goodness) and she has it.”
When Cather was homebound for four weeks with bronchitis, Yehudi and Nola Menuhin visited her nearly every day; he tended to the fire, and she made tea. He was even more of a solace as Cather experienced loss: the deaths of her brothers and of her old friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who had introduced Cather and Menuhin.
Little, however, could lift her from the depressive isolation that followed her surgery for breast cancer in early 1946. She wasn’t seeing any friends, “not even Yehudi,” and wasn’t even listening to music, she wrote to her sister-in-law Meta Cather. “I have simply had, for the present, to cut out all the things I loved most.”
Cather would make it out again; her last night on the town was to see Menuhin play at Carnegie Hall. Then, in March 1947, he visited her at home with his two children. Hephzibah was there, too, with her husband and two boys. “Here we all were (the children only were new), the rest of us were sitting in these rooms just as we used to meet here every week 10 and 12 years ago,” Cather recounted in a letter the next day.
The Menuhins were stopping by on their way to board the Queen Elizabeth. About an hour an a half before it was to set sail, they “quietly rose,” Cather recalled, then “without any flurry, dropped in the elevator to the street floor.” Seemingly understood but unspoken was that this would be the last time they saw one another. Cather died in April.
In the letter about that final visit, Cather said that this friendship had been “one of the chief interests and joys of my life.” She went as far as to say that she would rather have almost any other chapter of her life left out than that of her time with Menuhin and his sisters. Even then, as adults, they felt like dear children to her, Aunt Willa.
“Today,” she said at the end of the letter, “these rooms seem actually full of their presence and their faithful, loving friendship.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
