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 |
Thank you for sending me the story, which I think I have been able to improve somewhat3. You ask me about the
novel4–
indeed, you asked me about it once before and I neglected to answer your question.
The truth is that I had not taken it out of the wrapper in which you sent it back
to
me, nor even opened it, until some weeks ago when I needed a piece of string and
used the one which had been put around it in your office. So yo you see that I have done absolutely nothing with
it. It seems t to be not quite bad enough to throw away, and not quite good enough to
wrestle with again, therefore it reposes5 in my old hat box.
I do think it was most awfully zealous of you to put in a word atto
Mr. James6 and definitely call his attention
to the book7, but I know that you must
think his reply worth your pains. It's such a strikingly personal communication8,
although it's about something toward which he declares himself dead. The letter has
been
has given me a very keen kind of satisfaction,
for the attitude he admits is so exactly that which one would wish him to have. I've
always known that he must feel just so, but it's comforting, all the same, to have
it from him in black and white. [illegible]
iIf Mr. James and one or two other men did not feel just as he affirms
about our whole amazing scheme of production,–––– well, it would really break one's spirit,
you know. It would be a very deep personal hurt. It's this the unshrinking positiveness of his statement as to his estimation
of the value of what he terms "promiscuous fiction" that makes Mr. James' letter a
kind of moral stimulant. You shall see with what good grace I can stand up to thewhatever punishment which
he will metes out to me in his second letter9, to have had the satisfaction of the first. In
anticipation of a second letter, however, I certainly do ask your sympathy, even
though he should refine upon his treatment in the light of the presupposed youth and
innocence of the subject. I feel a good deal as if I were about to undergo a
searching physical examination from which I should come away with my former
unsuspecting confidence in the ordinary reputableness and dependableness of my
organs forever distroyed.shaken.
Or, worse still, with yourmy doubts horribly confirmed. The
prospect of his doing what he calls "his best" by me,––– well,
wouldn't you, now, when you were you actually facing
the prospect of such an attention, have to whistle to keep up your courage?
So I'll ask your sympathy and beg you, when you get his diagnisis, to let me have it faithfully and soon.
Faithfully Willa Sibert Cather February twenty–fourth.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0110.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0110
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Witter Bynner1
- Date letter was written
- February 24 [1906]
- Place letter was written
- unknown place2
- Location of original letter
- Bynner, Witter, 1881–1968 (MS AM 1629), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
The story Cather received from Bynner is unknown, but presumably it was one of her own. The next story she published in McClure's Magazine--or anywhere at all--after this letter was written was "The Namesake" in March 1907.
According to a letter from Edith Lewis to E. K. Brown (February 11, 1950), Cather's manuscript of her unpublished novel about "stage people" and titled "Fanny" was not destroyed until after she had moved to 5 Bank Street in 1912.
James's letter to Bynner of February 1, 1906, acknowledges receipt of The Troll Garden and confesses to not reading it or intending to read it, explaining, " . . . promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost any new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from the innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps above all. This is a subject--my battered, cynical, all-too-expert outliving of such possibilities--on which I could be eloquent; but I haven't time, and I will be more vivid and complete some other day. I've only time now to say that I will then (in spite of these professions) do my best for Miss Cather--so as not to be shamed by your so doing yours."
James made no known further remarks on Cather or her work.
Person Annotations
Bynner, Witter (1881-1968). American poet and playwright. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Bynner spent most of his childhood in Brookline, MA, and graduated from Harvard University in 1902. The same year he joined the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City, first as an office boy and then as assistant to literary editor Viola Roseboro’. He also worked on matters pertaining to the associated book publishing firm McClure, Phillips, and Co. Bynner sent copies of Cather’s The Troll Garden (1905), published by McClure, Phillips, and Co., to Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Margaret Deland; he conveyed back to Cather James’ dismissive response about American women authors. Bynner left McClure’s in 1906 to concentrate on his poetry and sent Cather a copy of his first book of poems, An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems (1907), to which she responded graciously, but by 1915 she used his name as a shorthand for the worst of modern poetry. In 1916 with his fellow poet Arthur Davison Ficke, Bynner undertook to satirize the Imagist school of poetry by concocting a fake school of poetry, the Spectrics. Bynner assumed the persona Emanual Morgan while Ficke became Anne Knish; they maintained the façade until the 1920s. As a result of a trip to Asia in 1917 with Ficke, Bynner became interested in Chinese T’Ang Dynasty poetry and collaboratively produced a volume of translations with Kiang Kan-hum, The Jade Mountain (1929). He also continued to be a prolific author of original verse. He and Spud Johnson, his secretary and lover, traveled in the American Southwest and Mexico with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence in 1923. Bynner subsequently visited Santa Fe, NM, frequently and bought a house there in 1940. Bynner published a memoir of D.H. Lawrence, Journeys with Genius (1951). After Cather’s death, he was critical of Cather in print, and in letters he spread misinformation about her early career. From 1930, admirer Robert Hunt was his lover and personal assistant. He died in Santa Fe soon after the sudden death of Hunt.
James, Henry (1843-1916). Expatriate American fiction writer
and critic. Born in New York City to philosopher Henry James and
Mary Robertson Walsh James, Henry, Jr., was educated in both the United
States and Europe. After beginning his career in the U.S., he moved to Paris
in 1875 and lived the rest of his life in Europe, primarily in England, but
he also made regular extended trips to the Continent. James was influential
as both a writer and a theorist of fiction and was known for fiction about
Americans abroad and for representing the interior consciousness of his
characters. In the Lincoln Courier in 1895, Willa
Cather praised James as “that mighty master of language and keen student of
human action and motives.” Cather followed James’s lead in many of her short
stories of the 1890s and 1900s and in Alexander’s
Bridge (1912); Witter Bynner, who worked for S. S. McClure, sent
Cather’s story collection The Troll Garden (1905) to
James. In “My First Novels [There Were Two],” however, Cather characterized
her Jamesian phase as a false start. She never met James in person but
narrowly missed meeting him at Annie Adams Fields’ summer home during his
final visit to the U.S. in 1910-1911. James died in England, having
renounced his American citizenship during World War I.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Fanny (Pittsburgh novel) (unpublished) by Willa Cather
The Troll Garden (1905) by Willa Cather
