Her health declined further. Severe tendonitis was forcing her to wear an immobilizing brace on her right hand and arm. Writing had become all but impossible, and dictation of serious work was always out of the question. She’d written to Carrie Miner Sherwood, her childhood friend: “Of course I can’t dictate my own work—I have to see the picture shape itself on the page before me—the sound of my own voice would make me self-conscious. But I dictate all my letters, even those to old and dear friends.” Willa was in decline and knew it; she’d come to see life as a series of unbearable goodbyes, and lived clinched against the next devastating blow. In the Line-a-Day she kept sporadically at this time, “very tired” and “deathly tired” are typical entries. Additional strain resulted from her determination to dictate responses to the soldiers and sailors who’d read her books in the special Armed Forces Editions and written to thank her. While she was inclined in these years to say no to most everything—no to all requests to adapt books for stage or screen or radio, no to Viking’s proposal of a Portable Cather, no to all interviews—she felt an obligation to the men at arms she heard from almost daily and made it a priority to dictate responses to them.
On the other hand, her response to a Professor Carl J. Weber of Colby College was blunt. She begged for no more queries about her sources, meetings, inspirations, and creative process. “After all,” she tersely wrote, “this is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She concluded the letter with a preposterous lie, and slammed the door: “I am leaving for Mexico City within a few days, and this is an opportune time to bring our correspondence to a close.” Whenever Willa wished to fend someone off, she would say she was going to Mexico City, a place she never in her life visited.
