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 |
The Outlook3 people simply say that they do not know when they can publish the second4 article5. I told them that I wanted to know to arrange for book rights, but they replied coldly that they were sorry, but they could give me no date. You should certainly write to whoever said the articles would be published in successive numbers. If this was said in a letter from the Outlook, so much the better. I would not write in wrath, but I would speak firmly. They have not behaved well and and they ought to explain their conduct. I know no one on the staff there, so my conversation with them was by telephone from our office6. They would be more likely to tell the truth to another publishing house, and the interest of one publishing house always stimulates another. But these people are a dead lot.
I cabled you to send the story7 along to Harrison8 because I thought he could get an idea of
it even with one page gone, and since the book is to come out early in the fall9 there would be no chance of
his running it except in the summer numbers. I shall write to him at once explaining
this, and telling him that I will send a postal note for the postage. That will be
simple. I'll be forever grateful to you if you corrected the French. I tried to use
the queer sort they speak out there10,
but I felt that I was unsuc unsuccessful, so it will
be better to have it simply correct. I wrote it down by ear, so to speak, phrases
I
heard out there11 last summer. They are
inconsistent—always spell the church "Sainte Anne", the town "Saint Anne." etc. ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩
I feel such a sense of relief that you do like it. You put your finger exactly on
the
weak spot when you say that the skeleton does not stand out enough. The modelling
is
not bold. But the country itself has no skeleton—no rocks or ridges. It's a fluid
black soil that runs through your fingers, composed not of
by the decay of big vegetation but that of the light ashes of grass. It's all soft, and
somehow that influences the mood in which one writes of it—and so the very structure
of the story. Oh I would like to do one with nice sharp lines, like the mountains
you now have behind you! That I would!
Mr. Greenslet12 rose to the occasion like a
gentleman. He was delightfully enthusiastic about this story, and they are rushing
it into type without delay. He is very strong for Marie, like the other gentlemen.
I
believe Frank satisfies me me more than any of the people in it. Just now I'm in the trough of
the wave about it. Having got it through and arranged for, I can be honest with
myself and admit that I really want to do a very different s sort of thing. I went up to see Fremstad13 last week and ever since I've been choked by things
unutterable. If one could write all that that
battered Swede makes one know, that would be worth
while. Lord, but she is like the women on the women
on the Divide14! The suspicious, defiant,
far-seeing pioneer eyes. Yesterday, after she sang Kundry in the Good Friday "Parsifal15," I
ran into her as she was getting into her motor. I wanted to shout "Pretty good for
you, Mrs. Ericson!" But instead I bowed to her charming secretary16. Frem Fremstad's eyes were
empty glass. She had spent her charge. Hurrah for Mrs. Ericson!
And Oh, Elsie Sergeant, her apartment ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ is just like Alexandra's pl house17! The
mixture of "mission" and gold legs, and the chairs!
The poor thing's ideas of comfort have never had a chance to develop. I learned from
her secretary that she had had some twenty "sets" of furniture sent up before she
selected the agonizing objects I saw about me.
Miss McClung18 has been with me for three weeks.
She says please remember her in that land19
where you now are. I've been thinking of you there with a kind of mournful pleasure.
It wont be very long long until you come now, will
it? That will be good indeed! Thank you for everything: for reading the story and
for liking it and for wanting to like it—this last most of all. It gives me great
pleasure to please you; but more pleasure to feel that you care about the whole
thing,—aside from stories, aside from me or yourself or anybody else. As I've
told you, I dont know as many as six people who know or care anything about writing. You've
read Mérimee20's "Lettres a une Inconnue"21? If not, do! I love that dry, proud old chap!
In so far as I like his pride, and his
contemptuousness. Thank you, and thank you. Goodbye
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0257.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0257
- Contents
- Document is three leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant1
- Date letter was written
- [March 22, 1913]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Cather wrote "April 22" in error, as her reference to seeing Fremstad sing the role of Kundry "yesterday" in the Good Friday performance of Parsifal indicates this letter was composed on Saturday, March 22, 1913, the day after that performance.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
The Outlook previously published Sergeant's "Out of the Workshops of Fashion: Some Types of Paris Working-Girls" in their 26 October 1912 issue.
The office of McClure's Magazine.
O Pioneers! was published 28 June 1913.
In O Pioneers!, Cather includes characters inspired by the French-Canadian community that settled near Campbell in south-central Nebraska.
High tableland in south central Nebraska marking the division between the Republican River watershed and the Little Blue River watershed. Cather writes about the Divide in O Pioneers! (1913) and several other works.
In O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson's house is described this way: "If you go up the hill and enter Alexandra's big house, you will find that it is curiously unfinished and uneven in comfort. One room is papered, carpeted, over-furnished; the next is almost bare. The pleasantest rooms in the house are the kitchen—where Alexandra's three young Swedish girls chatter and cook and pickle and preserve all summer long—and the sitting-room, in which Alexandra has brought together the old homely furniture that the Bergsons used in their first log house, the family portraits, and the few things her mother brought from Sweden."
Person Annotations
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and
author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston,
Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910,
Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s
Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the
Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914
Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was
injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She
moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony
and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her
back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of
prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927).
Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from
1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico
and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors
and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s
letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s
writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite
Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather
politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A
Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to
her.
Harrison. Periodical editor. There is insufficient evidence for a definitive identification, but this may be Austin Harrison (1873–1928), the British editor of the English Review from 1909-1923. The Review, founded by Ford Madox Ford, published fiction by many well-known writers, including Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Austin Harrison is credited with opening the English Review to women and non-British writers and may have been contacted by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about the possible serialization of Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) in its pages.
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.
Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer.
Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a
Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in
Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York
City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli
Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made
her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in
singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met
Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for
McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly
prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine
Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and
regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to
Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled.
Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea
Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and
she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify
the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice.
During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived
as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death,
published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge
(1954).
Cushing, Mary Fitch Watkins (1889-1974). American editor, critic, and author. Born in New Haven, CT, to Schureman Halsted Watkins and Helen Randall Smith Watkins, Mary Watkins studied at the Art Students League in New York City. She met Wagnerian opera star Olive Fremstad in 1911. Her memoir The Rainbow Bridge (1954) recounts her time as Fremstad’s personal secretary (1911-1918), including their friendship with Cather. During WWI, Cushing served in the women’s motor corps in France. Later she married Edward Cushing, a music critic and editor; they had a daughter, Antonia Cushing (later Stone). Cushing worked as a dance critic and editor for the New York Herald Tribune and became a freelance magazine writer in 1934. Watkins also wrote First Aid to the Opera-Goer (1924) and Behind the Scenes at the Opera (1925).
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.
Mérimée, Prosper (1802-1870). French writer and translator. Born in Paris, the son of painters, Prosper Mérimée studied law but turned his attention to literature. His early novels were unsuccessful, but he developed the novella form; his novella Carmen (1845) became the basis of Georges Bizet’s opera. Well-traveled and fluent in several languages, he translated works by Pushkin and Gogol among others. In 1844 Mérimée was elected to the Académie Française. He also held various administrative positions under King Louis Philippe, and was instrumental in preserving many ancient monuments. Willa Cather used his method of using footnotes to explain untranslatable foreign words in his stories as an example for some of her translators.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Outlook
"The Other Side of the Door: A Glimpse of the Paris Home-Workers," The Outlook (May 24, 1913) by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
Parsifal (July 26, 1882) by Richard Wagner
Lettres à une inconnue (1874) by Prosper Mérimée
