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 |
This is a blistering hot Fourth–In fact, it’s been blistering ever since you left. Two of the worst nights I’ve ever put in in New York2. You are surely in a cool spot today. Not a sign of a yellow stocking anywhere, no more than if you’d come hoseless from France4. I hope they turned up - - - - in your furs, maybe.
Landing in New York in summer was pretty hard on you, but your doing it was very grand for me. I had two splendid days, and I’d looked forward to them for a long while. I’m glad you were sleepy. I had a better chance to observe you when you weren’t shooting my mind off to observe other things, and you seemed to me in such splendid trim, from top to toe. I feel that it is going to stay by you, too, even if you found the domestic machinery in Brookline5 complicated after Provençe6. I tried to write Miss McClung7 a rhapsodical description of your Avignon8 gown, but am conscious that I dismally failed. I never can write about clothes. I intend to get Kronstall’s9 out of the fashion column of a theatre program.
Pray forgive this intense note paper, which might well be Farrar10’s, with a song bird on it. It is the only intensity I can boast of until cooler weather. Only a cicada could write in this heat. But I’m so grateful it didn’t come while you were here, when I was having a glorious time that I quite forgot to realize how the heavy air here must weigh upon you. Since you left, it’s been like being marooned on a naked spit of sand somewhere.
Joy to you, and work, and keep your “good tone.”
Yours W. S. C. Miss Elizabeth Sergeant1 Chocorua3 N.H. NEW YORK N.Y.STAO2 JUL 4 1913 630 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0260.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0260
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant1
- Date letter was written
- July 4 [1913]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historcal Manuscripts (MA 1602 (32)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
Cather is likely describing a character she is creating in her next novel, probably the one who became Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (1915).
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.
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.
Farrar, Geraldine (1882-1967). American opera singer. Born in
Melrose, MA, to a professional baseball player father and an amateur singer
mother, Geraldine Farrar began formal study of voice in Boston in 1894 and
then studied in New York City from 1897 to 1899, when she, accompanied by
her parents, left for study in Europe. Her operatic career began in earnest
in 1900, and she made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1906
in Roméo et Juliette. As a regular opera goer in New
York City, Cather often heard Farrar sing at the Met, and she met her when
researching “Three American Singers: Louise Homer, Geraldine Farrar, Olive
Fremstad” (McClure’s Magazine December 1913). Cather
comments on Farrar’s noted talent for acting, as well as singing, her
operatic roles, and her indebtedness to French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who
took Farrar under her wing in Paris. Elements of Farrar’s personality and
career may have inspired aspects of Kitty Ayreshire, featured in Cather’s
stories “A Gold Slipper” (1917) and “Scandal” (1919). Farrar retired from
the operatic stage in 1922 but continued her regular concert touring in her
personal Pullman rail car, bringing operatic music to small towns and
working class audiences. She also acted in silent film versions of operas
and was a popular recording artist. References in Cather’s letters suggest
that Cather saw Farrar socially in New York City and may have corresponded
with her, but no letters are known.
Place Annotations
