Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
I read your book3 at once after I wrote you4, but I’ve not had time to take up a pen for
all the bother of doctors etc. The book was my only rest from a doctors etc. I like it immensely, but I like some
parts of it very specially. Best of all I liked Morris and his wife—their relations.
It’s strange and baffling and one never questions it—and never understands it. I’ve
thought about it a great deal at odd moments. It’s unexpected and unaccountable, but
it’s splendid. Of course it’s so interesting because Morris himself is so
interesting. He’s a terrible comment on how badly scholarship and family life seem
to mix. But there’s such distinction about him in spite of his littlenesses. and his
position in the world and in society is grim enough. He’s a splendid figure—I’ll
never forget him. I’ve not told you half how much he takes hold of me. He’s absolute
reality to me.
I like Adrian, too—but best as a young man. He’s so really a young man. It’s
delightful the way one feels his youth and natural good spirits—there’s a charm
about him, and cham charm is one of the things that
people on paper so seldom have. After he gets older and thoughtful and domestic, he
loses something - - for me, at least. Of course all the Paris5 part is splendid, and it’s there that I like Matey best and
seem to see her most clearly as an individual. In some of the early part she seems
to me too much on the page—she’s brought up to me so closelyclosely that I can’t see her distinctly. It’s only when I see her
in relation to things that are not her own immediate personal concerns that she
emerges clearly for me. I tried to tell “everything” about a young person once, in
“The Song of the Lark”6—and I think it’s a
mistake. Since one can’t tell everything, I’ve come to
think one must tell very little, unless one blurs the picture. You’ll say, “What
about Proust7?”
"Well, in the first person it can be done. YouHe can say “I thought all
these things about Albertine8 and saw all these
things.” and if one is not interested in all little Marcel’s sensations one can tell
him you'veone’s had enough.
Almost everyone writes in the third person as
if they were writing in the first,—too
intimately, I mean, and it makes an unsteady focus on the page. I put it badly, but
you see my meaning?
Oh Dorothy, apropos of this, and of “styles”, I do want to tell you of an amazing
adventure I had at Aix-les-Bains9 last
summer! You There are only three people in the world
I want to tell it to, and you are one. You could never guess who out of the Great Past10, old and in disguise, I
met there! It will mean something to you.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1027.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1027
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto only of the first leaf and on recto and verso of the second leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher1
- Date letter was written
- December 1 [1930]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by the reference to Canfield Fisher's 1930 novel The Deepening Stream and to Cather's travel in France in the summer of 1930.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Dorothy Canfield Collection (mss-975), University of Vermont, Bailey-Howe Library, Burlington, VT
Individual Annotations
See #1025.
Person Annotations
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958). American novelist; educational
and social reformer. Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather became
friends in 1891 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Canfield's
father, James Canfield, had come to serve as Chancellor. The family moved to
Columbus, OH, in 1895 when James Canfield assumed the presidency of Ohio
State University, from which Dorothy graduated in 1899. She then followed
her father to New York City, where he became Librarian of Columbia
University, and she pursued graduate study in Romance Languages at the
University of Paris and Columbia, from which she earned a PhD in 1904. On
Cather’s first trip to Europe, she spent time in France and England with
Canfield, including an awkward visit to the home of poet A.E. Housman.
Cather derived the central character of “The Profile” (1907) from Canfield’s
friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met in Europe. Cather and Canfield
became estranged for more than a decade because Canfield objected to the
story’s planned inclusion in The Troll Garden (1905).
Canfield married John Redwood Fisher in 1907, and their primary residence
was Arlington, VT. Canfield Fisher had spent 1916-1918 in France engaging in
war relief work, and Cather’s consultation with her about the accuracy of
her depiction of wartime France in One of Ours (1922)
led them to reconcile. In 1925 Canfield Fisher became a founding member of
the Book of the Month Club selection committee. She published her novels
(most of them very popular) under the name Dorothy Canfield but her various
nonfiction works as Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Proust, Marcel (1871-1922). French author. Born in Auteuil, France, to Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil, Marcel Proust received degrees in law and literature from the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Best known for his seven-part masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), Proust is widely considered a premier 20th-century author. Cather read his first novel, Swann’s Way (1913), as well as Within a Budding Grove (1918).
Grout, Caroline Hamard (1846-1931). Niece of Gustave Flaubert, memoirist. Born near Rouen, France, Caroline Hamard is the “Caro” of Gustave Flaubert’s Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline (1906). When she was two months old, her mother, Flaubert’s sister, died and her father was incapacitated by mental illness. She was raised by her maternal grandmother and uncle Gustave at their home, Croisset. Her first husband, Ernest Commanville, died in 1890; she was married to Dr. Franklin Grout from 1900 until his death in 1920. Her Souvenirs sur Gustave Flaubert was published in 1897 as the preface to the first edition of Flaubert’s correspondence, and her memoir about her uncle, Heures d’autrefois. Mémoires inédits. Souvenirs intimes et autres textes, was published posthumously in 1999. In 1930, when she was known as Caroline Franklin Grout, Willa Cather met her at the Grand-Hôtel d’Aix in the French resort town Aix-les-Bains. Cather’s essay “A Chance Meeting,” first published in the February 1933 Atlantic Monthly and collected in Not Under Forty (1936), recounts how she met Grout during the intermission of a concert and and enjoyed wide-ranging conversations with her in ensuing days.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Deepening Stream (1930) by Dorothy Canfield
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
Remembrance of Things Past (1913 to 1917) by Marcel Proust
