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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 |
Do you know the rue du Chat qui Pêche?3
ADRESSE TÉLÉGRAPHIQUECONTENTAL–PARIS HÔTEL CONTINENTAL
3, RUE CASTIGLIONE
PARIS FG Sunday, June 20 Dear Mr. Greenslet1:
I still live at the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, but am for the nonce visiting friends
at
thise this rich hostelry.
Last week Miss Lewis4 and I had an excellent dinner, with a good champagne, at Lapérouse for a hundred francs. I liked the place itself almost as well as the food, and it is not extravagant in price as Paris2 restaurants go now. At small hotels, like the Voltaire and the Hotel des Saintes Peres, one can still dine excellently, though somewhat slenderly, for ten francs. I am not going to shop any more than I have to, however. Everything in shops is costly, and the great change is that now all the less expensive things look cheap and shabby, as cheap things used to look in London5. You can still get a beautiful hat for 500 francs, but a 150 franc hat looks like 14th street in New York6. Silk gloves at 18 francs come to pieces the first time you put them on.
When we first arrived we spent a week in costly splendour at the Palais d'Orsay, and
we
ADRESSE TÉLÉGRAPHIQUE
CONTENTAL–PARIS
HÔTEL CONTINENTAL
3, RUE CASTIGLIONE
PARIS still go there for dinner when neither of us is dining with
friends. Miss Lewis goes on to Italy7 next
week. The Hambourgs8 arrive on
Saturday. I shall be here with them for several weeks, then go for a trip about the
south of France9 with them. We will all meet
at Sorrento10 about the end of July11. Then I hope to fall to work
in a lemon house in the garden of my
friends12 there. The garden runs down into the sea—or the bathing beach
which terminates it does.
I have not planned any new paragraphs for Claude13 yet, as a result of being here,—but I have planned to cut out several that otherwise would have gone in—so I
feel I've not spent my francs in vain, especially those I have seen disappear in
liquids ruddy and golden, lively and still, thin and sharp, and thick and yellow as machine oil. The fruit and
street flowers are not to be despised at this season. But the wines of France are
really the supreme expression of its moods. I wish you were here. I could tell you
a
great many things that would sound absurd on either Bank14 or Park15
streets!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0509.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0509
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto only of each leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- June 20 [1920]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by corresponding letters to Cather from Houghton Mifflin staff.
- Place letter was written
- Paris, Île-de-France, France2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company Correspondence and Records (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Translation: Street of the Cat Who Fishes (French).
Cather did not complete this part of her trip because Edith Lewis, who went ahead of her to visit Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow-Brewster, reported severe food shortages in Italy (see #0513).
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Houghton Mifflin's offices in Boston were located on Park Street.
Person Annotations
Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer.
Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from
Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as
associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to
1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children,
Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized
in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston
publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially
and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett,
who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to
submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published
novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief
of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of
the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as
partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet
negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent
from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became
a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department
in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of
her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and
undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters
to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime
friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially
prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress
Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to
reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to
live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of
Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung
accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved
to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh,
finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited
New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also
rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together
to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father,
Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist
Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in
1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the
Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather
and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and
1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S.
for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her
death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving
her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work,
through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After
Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to
Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few
letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.
Hambourg, Jan (1882-1947). Russian-born violinist; Isabelle
McClung’s husband. Hambourg moved with his family to Toronto,
Ontario, in 1910, where he was the head of the violin department at the
Hambourg Conservatory and performed as part of the Hambourg Trio. He married
Isabelle McClung in April 1916. Cather reacted negatively to both Hambourg
and the marriage, but she gradually came to accept him. Beginning in the
1920s, Hambourg left the family conservatory and focused on solo violin
performance in Europe. Cather enjoying long visits with Isabelle and Jan in
Toronto in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. She dedicated The Professor’s House (1925) to him (“For Jan, because he likes
narrative”) and asked him to make musical corrections to Lucy Gayheart (1935). When Isabelle died, Jan sent to Cather the
three hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather
destroyed them.
Barlow-Brewster, Achsah (1878-1945). Expatriate American painter.
Born in New Haven, CT, Achsah Brewster graduated in 1902 from Smith
College, where Edith Lewis had become her roommate in 1899, inaugurating a
long friendship. After college, Achsah moved to New York City to study
painting at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. After
she returned from a year of study in France, fellow student (and later poet)
Vachel Lindsay introduced her to Earl Brewster. She may have met Willa
Cather as early as 1904, when Cather, visiting New York from Pittsburgh,
stayed with Edith Lewis on Washington Square. In 1910, she and Earl Brewster
married and moved to Europe, returning to the U.S. only once, in 1923. From
1910 through 1935, they lived in various locations in France (where their
daughter Harwood was born in 1912) and in Italy (where they met D. H.
Lawrence and his wife Frieda in 1921), while also traveling widely in Europe
and to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. Edith Lewis visited Achsah and Earl in
Ravello, Italy, in 1914 and 1920 and in Cyr-sur-Mer, France, in 1930 (with
Cather) and 1935. When Earl, Achsah, and Harwood moved to Paris in the early
1920s, they became friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Jan Hambourg. In
1935, Achsah and Earl moved to the Himalayan region of India, where she died
ten years later after a long illness.
Brewster, Earl (1878-1957). Expatriate American painter. Born
in Chagrin Falls, OH, Earl Brewster attended the Cleveland Institute of Art
for a year before moving to New York City in 1899 to study at the Art
Students League and the New York School of Art. He married fellow painter
Achsah Barlow in 1910. They immediately moved to Europe, returning to the
U.S. only once, in 1923. From 1910 through 1935, Earl and Achsah lived in
France (where their daughter Harwood was born in 1912) and Italy (where they
met D. H. Lawrence in 1921), while traveling widely in Europe and to Ceylon
(Sri Lanka) and India. Edith Lewis visited Achsah and Earl in Ravello,
Italy, in 1914 and 1920 and in Cyr-sur-Mer, France, in 1930 (with Cather)
and 1935. When Earl, Achsah, and Harwood moved to Paris in the early 1920s,
they became friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Jan Hambourg. Earl had
begun studying eastern religions early in his life, including the Vedanta
school of Hindu religious philosophy, and he incorporated Buddhist
iconography into his paintings. In 1935, the Brewsters moved to the
Himalayan region of India, where he died more than two decades later.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather
