Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
The article3 about which I wrote you is not exactly a review of my new book4, but a general estimate of all my books and of me. From the letters I have received about it, I gather that it is accepted as your opinion and the Forum5's opinion; Mr. Hicks6 is not mentioned. It is probably your policy to give your reviewers a free hand, but there are limits to all edotorial policies. When I was editing McClures7 I would certainly not have allowed an article so generally derogatory to you to appear in the magazine. Had Mr. McClure8 and I both been abroad, the office staff would not have allowed an article so detrimental to an author for whom we had any regard to be printed, without first consulting us.
Granted that you felt the time had come to utter a few unpleasant truths, it is
possible to say uncomplimentary things in a courteous and even a respectful way,.
bBut the tone of this article is sarcastic and contemptuous throughout,
and no desk editor representing you in your absence would have printed such an
article about any writer for whom you had much regard.
The Forum, I realize, has a right to put as low an estimate as you think just upon any writer's abilities, but I question the editorial ethics of printing a statement like the following: Like most of her books, it is elegiac, beguiling its readers with pictures of a life that has disappeared, and deliberately exploiting the remoteness of that life in order to cast a golden haze about it.
⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩To 'deliberately exploit' is certainly to use things or p persons rather craftily for one's own advantage. Those words have a bad
history, and their connotation is worse than their literal meaning. You must know
that I am not an opportunist or a trickster. If you wished to tell the public a few
plain truths about me, you could surely have given the job to someone who was not
malicious.
A good many reviewers do not like this book very well. Dr. Cross9, who reviewed10 it for Mr. Canby11, is, I gather, somewhat disappointed in it. But he has enough scholarship and literary background to see just what I was trying to do, and he gives me credit for an honest effort even though he wishes I had done something else.
An article of
in this tone, appearing in a magazine of
The
Forum's standing, does one harm,
certainly, as it was intended to do;. But I think the hurt it gives my
feelings, coming from a publication with which I had always had most pleasant and
friendly relations, far outweighs any other harm. This is the first letter of
protest I have ever written an editor concerning a review, and I am very sad that
it
is to you I am addressing it.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1842.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1842
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Henry Goddard Leach1
- Date letter was written
- September 1 [1931]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by the publication of Granville Hicks's "Bright Incidents" in the September 1931 issue of the Forum.
- Place letter was written
- Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Adams 162), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Person Annotations
Leach, Henry Goddard (1880-1970). American author, educator, and editor. Leach (Princeton University BA 1903, Harvard University PhD 1908) was a leading authority on Scandinavian literature. He served as editor of The Forum from 1923 to 1940 and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation from 1926 to 1947. The Forum serialized Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and published “Double Birthday” (1929) in two parts. When Granville Hicks used a review of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in the Forum to launch what Cather perceived as an attack on her personally, she was aggrieved but accepted Leach’s apparent apology. It is not clear when Cather and Leach first met, and their extant correspondence relates exclusively to his work as editor of the Forum. However, in the 1940s she called him an “old friend” and apparently saw him socially in New York City (#2191).
Hicks, Granville (1901-1982). American critic and writer. Born in New Hampshire, the only child of Frank and Carrie Hicks, Granville Hicks earned a BA (1923) and MA (1929) from Harvard University and briefly studied for the ministry. He taught biblical literature at Smith College from 1926-28, English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1929-35 (he believed he was dismissed for his political views), and American Civilization at Harvard from 1938 to 1939. Drawn to Marxist ideas, he became literary editor of the New Masses and joined the American Communist Party in 1934. Under the sway of Marxist thought, he became a strident critic of what he saw as Cather’s escapism, including in a review of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in the Forum, “The Case Against Willa Cather” in the English Journal (1933), and in The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933). Cather was under the misapprehension that Hicks had a brother who was also a leftist literary critic. Hicks broke with the Communist party in 1939, upon the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. After his firing from RPI, Hicks and his wife Dorothy Dyer and their daughter, Stephanie, moved to Grafton, NY, and his book Small Town (1946) made him a notable proponent of rural small-town life, and he was actively anti-communist during the 1950s. He died in Franklin Park, NJ.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Cross, Wilbur (1862-1948). American scholar and state governor.
Wilbur Cross was born in Connecticut and educated at Yale, where he
earned a PhD in 1889. He became an English literature professor at Yale in
1894, specializing in the novel and editing the Yale
Review (for which he solicited articles from Cather). An
influential literary critic, Cross wrote an important review of Shadows on the Rock (1931), to which Cather replied
in one of her few letters commenting on her work to be made public. After
Cross’s retirement from Yale, he was elected governor of Connecticut,
serving four two-year terms from 1931 to 1939.
Canby, Henry Seidel (1878-1961). American critic and editor. Born to a prominent Wilmington, DE, family, Canby received a BA (1899) and PhD (1905) from Yale University. He began teaching English at Yale in 1900 and was editor of the Yale Review from 1911 to 1922. In 1920 he founded the Literary Review of the New York Post, which became an independent magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature, in 1924; he served as editor until 1936. He became editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club on its founding in 1926. Canby married Marion Ponsonby Gause, also of Wilmington, in 1907, and they had two sons. Cather’s acquaintance with the Canbys seems to predate 1922, when her cordial correspondence with the Canbys began. In the Literary Review she published "The House on Charles Street" (1922) and in the Saturday Review a letter to Wilbur Cross on Shadows on the Rock (1931) and an essay on Thomas Mann (1936).
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
Work Annotations
"Bright Incidents," Forum (September 1931) by Granville Hicks
Shadows on the Rock (1931) by Willa Cather
Forum
McClure's Magazine
"Men and Images," Saturday Review of Literature (August 22, 1931) by Wilbur Cross
