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 |
You were the most tactful as well as the most generous of people when you gave us that picture of yourself. It has been a singularly actual comfort in a rather gloomy and disheartening period. As I told you before, it's to me what country folk call a speaking likeness. And as I'd been feeling eternally disgraced in the eyes of everyone connected with the firm, it brought me to my feet with a start. The whole affair3, you see, has been the nearest approach I've ever made to a personal disgrace, and the whole row has been so incomprehensible to me,—I seem to have done something4 so horrid and am so utterly in the dark as to what it is,—that I've been seriously questioning as to whether I have any moral sense at all. If Isabelle5 didn't feel just as I do, and If I had not such entire confidence not only in her very vigorous sense of right and wrong but in her admirable taste in matters of conduct generally, I should certainly think I must be deficient in the finer kind of moral rectitude. I'm sure that some day the humor of the whole complication will stand out above everything else, but so far I've been rather too sore to laugh much.
I have a week's vacation the last of March and I am hoping to go to New York6 then. One gets so terribly in the rut here in the winter, though, that one's rather timid about venturing out. I don't know whether you've ever been in a grind long enough to realize what that feeling is, and how stupid and flat and dull it makes people. You get to wanting to stay at home just to hide your own dullness—you're so afraid you'll be found out and your shameful nakedness exposed. Isabelle frequently threatens to drug me and put me in a Pullman and ship me off for parts unknown, so that I'll have to waken up and use my wits. So I may arrive in New York in a semi-conscious state sometime in the last week of March.
The exceeding heaviness of my mind accounts for my not having written to you before. I've been really too dead to address so living a person as yourself. You may remember the shadows who came up and accosted Ulysses in Hades and tried to communicate, but only succeeded in troubling the air with a sigh or two and then drifted back into the myrtle wood. Well, I'm not reclining under the myrtles, and outwardly I'm pretty active, but I feel something of the impotence and timidity of the aforesaid ghosts. I went7 to hear Paderewski8 the other night and I verily felt so much a ghost that I wanted to quit the hall. My silence, you see, has been gracious. It was almost like seeing you myself to have Isabelle there, and I was particularly glad to have you see her again.
Faithfully Willa S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0103.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0103
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of first leaf and on recto only of second leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Viola Roseboro'1
- Date letter was written
- [February 19, 1905]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
February 19, 1905, was the Sunday following Paderewski's performance at Carnegie Hall on February 17, 1905.
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Adams 166), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
Cather is referring to her dispute with Dorothy Canfield over her story "The Profile" (see #0101).
Paderweski performed at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh on 17 February 1905.
Person Annotations
Roseboro’, Viola (1857-1945). American editor and author.
Born in Pulaski, TN, to parents whose abolitionist sympathies caused
them to flee the state shortly before the Civil War, Viola Roseboro’
graduated from Fairmount College in Monteagle, TN. Before moving to New York
City around 1882, she was an actress with a traveling stock company. In New
York she worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in
magazines while continuing to tour occasionally until she left the stage
permanently in 1887. Roseboro’ actively published fiction for the rest of
her life, including The Joyous Heart (1903), a Civil
War novel critical of Southern slavery, and Players and
Vagabonds (1904), a collection of stories about the theater. Having
sold short stories to the McClure fiction syndicate in the 1880s, in the
early 1890s she began evaluating manuscripts for the syndicate and soon did
the same for McClure’s Magazine and book publisher
McClure, Phillips & Co. Cather evidently first met Roseboro’ in 1903,
when S.S. McClure called her to New York to discuss her fiction; the two
women began corresponding, and Roseboro’ may have influenced McClure’s
decision to hire Cather as an editor for his magazine in 1906. When most of
the magazine editorial staff walked out on McClure that year, Roseboro’
stayed, but when S.S. McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, she left
for Collier’s Weekly. When her position there ended,
she moved to Staten Island and struggled to support herself as an author’s
consultant. When S.S. McClure regained control of his magazine in 1921, she
rejoined the staff and took an apartment at 13 Bank Street, but the position
did not last long and she was soon struggling to support herself again; a
1928 bequest from a friend alleviated her financial distress and allowed her
to live comfortably abroad and in New Dorp on Staten Island. Cather’s
letters to Roseboro’ suggest that, long after she became an established
author, Cather valued Roseboro’s friendship and her judgment in literary
matters. She particularly valued Roseboro’s response as a Southerner to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), an advance copy
of which she sent to her.
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.
Paderewsky, Ignacy Jan (1860-1941). Polish musician and politician.
Born to Polish parents in Ukraine, Paderewski studied at the Warsaw
Conservatory in Poland from 1872 to 1878. Actress Helena Modjeska helped him
early in his career. After his concert debut in 1887, he became
internationally popular; his long red hair and commanding presence became
the type of the virtuoso pianist. He made his New York debut in 1890, and he
toured North America almost annually thereafter. After World War I
Paderewski served briefly as Prime Minister of newly-independent Poland;
after the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II, he served as head
of the Polish government-in-exile in London. He died on a diplomatic and
musical tour of the U.S. and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery; in
1992 his body was returned to Warsaw. Cather heard him play in 1904 and Thea
Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (1915) attends a
recital by Paderewski.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"The Profile," McClure's Magazine (June 1907) by Willa Cather
