"In these days when the 'situation' is made to count for so much in writing.”

Many years ago scholar Tom Quirk showed how F. Scott Fitzgerald while writing The Great Gatsby (1925) was influenced by/and or plagiarized Willa Cather's writing. Fitzgerald himself had to admit it at the success of his novel. In particular, that he had been so deeply affected by what she was tapping into I believe that he also wanted to know and present that feminine ardor of presence Willa was able to emanate off the page. Quirk wrote, "Willa Cather had written Fitzgerald of her admiration of Gatsby in the spring of 1925; the next fall she would begin to write what she ultimately considered her finest novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)."

On 28 April 1925--now 99 1/2 years ago--she articulated in that careful and conscientious letter to a young Fitzgerald what I think is 'the thing to be desired'--the "consummation devoutly to be wished" essence of her writing, where the effect of Being which can be known of the feminine could be very carefully put to the page in such a way as to ultimately come off that page in experience and thereby bring to pass in consciousness what most extraordinarily, extremely beautifully IS. She wrote to him:

"So many people have tried to say that same thing before either you or I tried it, and nobody has said it yet. I suppose everybody who has ever been swept away by personal charm tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause,—and in the end we all fall back upon an old device and write about the effect and not the lovely creature who produced it. After all, the only thing one can tell about beauty, is just how hard one was hit by it. Isn’t that so?"

As a Being who writes--no outward career--emanating solely from Beingness--what interested me is what Quirk wrote next--what Willa touched on in this note and then moved deeper into in her writing: her next work “would be written, she would recall a few years later, in ‘the style of legend,’ the essence of which is to lightly ‘touch and pass on.’ Such a creative method would be a ‘kind of discipline,’ she wrote, ‘in these days when the 'situation' is made to count for so much in writing.’”

She saw how to do it.