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 |
R. L. S. 5 Bank Street3, June 30th Dear Mr. Greenslet1;
I think4
the jacket5 a delight to the eye6, and I think the description7 pasted inside the cover exceedingly good.
Better say the heroine8 grew up in
Moonstone, Colorado9, however, not Arizona10. Colorado has a considerable reading public, interested in
local color, and Arizona has not. Also, Thea
and Fred11 run away to Old Mexico12,
not New Mexico13, which would not be much of
a run, from Arizona. I wish, perhaps, that a word more could be said about her
struggles in Chicago14, and a word to the
effect that it was the Cliff Dweller
ruins15 that first aowwoke her historic imagination—so necessary
to a great Wagnerian16 singer—and that there,
away from drudgery for the first time in her life, she really grew, all at once,
into a powerful and wilful young creature, got her courage, began to find
herself.
I am not wholly happy about the cover, but I shan't be stubborn about it. You've never given me a cover I've liked. I've only borne them patiently. Have you a copy of the English edition of "Pioneers"17? I think that a de–lightful cover18, both as to color and composition. Couldn't you copy that cover19 for this book? If you have no copy of it, I'll send you mine. I'm afraid this cover will pain me as long as the book exists. I most heartily dislike it!
On the chance that haven't one of the Heinemann books20 at hand, I am sending you one, along with the dummy21. Please send it back to me.
I think Mr. James22 entirely too patronizing in
his paper23 on the Fieldses. Mr. Fields24 was the collector, anyhow. The habit of
gathering eagle feathers was superimposed upon Mrs.
Fields25. She would never have begun it odf her own
volition, or gone farther than keeping by her charming things that reminded her of
charming people. The place was a reliquary, not a museum26, [illegible], and the relics were attuned to each other and
ladhad been lived with so uncerimoniously and intimately that they had lost their unique quality; they had
become, and were, simply Mrs. Fieldses things, and one never felt they
were there to be looked at or referred to. I always thought that Jamie, himself27, probably made his
treasures stand out from the walls a little more, during his lifetime. But Mrs
Fields enjoyed their companionship and associations, not their uniqueness. I think
H. J. owes 148 Charles street28 a "solatium29"!
Please tell Mr. Scaife30 I will send him the screed31 he wants for the Boston Herald32.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0311.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0311
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- June 30 [1915]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
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.
On 28 June 1915 Greenslet wrote that she would be getting the "travellers dummy" of The Song of the Lark and solicited her response.
The dust jacket as published in 1915, featuring a version of Jules Breton's painting
"The Song of the Lark" (1884)
On 7 June 1915 Greenslet acknowledged "jacket text" sent by Cather while he was absent from the office. Although Houghton Mifflin introduced errors, some portion of this text was likely by Cather herself.
Thea Kronborg
Thea Kronborg and Fred Ottenburg
In Part IV: Ancient People, Thea Kronborg travels from Chicago to Fred Ottenburg's ranch in Arizona, where she spends most of her time in cliff dweller ruins in the fictional Panther Canyon (based on Walnut Canyon).
The cover of British edition of O Pioneers! published by William Heinemann of London in 1913.
The cover of the novel as published by Houghton Mifflin on 2 October 1915, the design makes clear that they took her advice to copy Heinemann's O Pioneers! cover as Greenslet promised on 2 July 1915.
Wiliam Heinemann Ltd. of London published the British edition of O Pioneers!
A mockup or sample of a book a publisher used for design and marketing purposes. A dummy typically included a draft cover and a small number of printed pages of the text, the rest of the volume being filled out with blank paper.
Henry James calls 148 Charles Street "the water-side museum of the Fieldses" displaying portraits, letters, manuscripts, and books associated with famous guests.
Cather is speculating that James T. Fields, rather than Annie Fields, was responsible for the way objects were displayed at 148 Charles Street.
148 Charles Street (Boston, MA): Home occupied by James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields beginning in 1856, when it was still number 37 on Charles Street. After James’ death in 1881, Sarah Orne Jewett moved into the house with Annie Fields, and the two women continued to entertain authors and artists as the Fieldses did during their marriage. Cather met the two of them in 1908 and wrote about her experience in “The House on Charles Street,” later revised as “148 Charles Street” in Not Under Forty (1936). Compliant with Annie Adams Fields’ will, the building was torn down after her death in 1915.
Cather seems to be using the word in the sense of compensation for an emotional injury.
No 1915 essay by Cather in the Boston Herald has been located.
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.
Wagner, Richard (1813-1883). German composer. Richard Wagner
was born in Leipzig, Germany. He taught himself to play the piano and the
principles of composition, partly by studying the scores of Beethoven's
works, and was also deeply influenced by his reading of Shakespeare,
Schiller, and Goethe. His early operas before Rienzi
(1842) were unsuccessful. In the wake of its success he began to develop his
more characteristic style. Although The Flying
Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), and Lohengrin (1850) were popular, critics were often
hostile, and his involvement with the Revolution of 1848 in Germany forced
him to flee into exile in Zurich, where he wrote on social and musical
issues, and composed the poem, The Ring of the
Nibelung, upon which his four Ring operas were based. The
difficulty of staging these titanic works led him to put them aside for such
works as Tristan and Isolde (1859). His financial
difficulties were alleviated when Ludvig II of Bavaria became his patron.
Wagner toured Europe to raise money for a new kind of theater at Bayreuth,
which would be capable of presenting the Ring; the
work was first given in its entirety at Bayreuth in 1876. His last work was
Parsifal (1882). Cather was an avid opera fan,
and references to his works appear throughout her works, most prominently “A
Wagner Matinee” (1904) and The Song of the Lark
(1915). She recommended Wagner’s autobiography My
Life to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, praising it as “all action”
(#0219), and wrote a preface for a 1925 edition of Gertrude Hall’s Wagnerian Romances (1925).
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.
Fields, James T. (1817-1881). American publisher, editor, and writer.
New Hampshire-born Fields is best known as a partner in the Boston,
MA, publishing house of Ticknor & Fields (established 1854), which
published the works of notable American authors, such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe. Although U.S. copyright law did not require the firm to pay British
authors for their works, he paid royalties to British authors such as Alfred
Tennyson and Charles Dickens. In 1859 his firm acquired the Atlantic Monthly magazine and Fields himself edited
it from 1861 to 1871. In 1854, the widowed Fields married young Annie Adams,
who survived him by many years. In Willa Cather’s essay about her friendship
with Annie Adams Fields “The House on Charles Street” (1922), revised as
“148 Charles Street” (1936), she reflects on her encounters in childhood
with books published by James Fields.
Fields, Annie Adams (1835-1915). Literary hostess, author, and social
reformer. At age 20, Annie Adams married James T. Fields,
partner in the Boston publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Both before
and after her husband’s death in 1881, Fields often entertained important
American, British, and European authors at her home at 148 Charles Street in
Boston, MA. After James’ death, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose books were
published by Ticknor & Fields, began sharing Annie’s homes at 148
Charles Street and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA. Cather met Fields in Boston in
1908, a meeting Cather described in "The House on Charles Street," an essay
reviewing Memories of a Hostess (a volume of
selections from Fields' journals, 1922). A revised version of this essay,
retitled "148 Charles Street," appeared in Not Under
Forty (1936). After Jewett’s death in 1909, Fields edited The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911), which
included several letters to Cather. Fearing that 148 Charles Street would
become a museum after her death, Fields requested that it be torn down.
Scaife, Roger Livingston (1875-1951). Head of publicity at Houghton Mifflin. An 1897 graduate of Harvard University, Scaife went to work for Houghton Mifflin in 1898 as assistant to Azaria Smith, head of the publicity department. Scaife subsequently assumed Smith’s position and became a shareholder of the corporation and secretary of the board of directors. In 1910, when Ferris Greenslet became editor in chief of the trade department, Scaife divided his shares 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. Scaife anonymously published three satirical novels with Houghton Mifflin, The Confessions of a Debutante (1913), Cape Codities (1920), and The Reflections of a T.B.M. (1920), and two books of children’s verse under his own name. Cather corresponded primarily with Greenslet about her novels, but in his absence she dealt with Scaife during the production of My Ántonia (1918), and her dissatisfaction with decisions made on his authority contributed to her decision to transfer her publishing business to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. In 1934 Scaife left Houghton Mifflin to become executive vice president of Little, Brown. He later became the fourth director of Harvard University Press.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
"Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields," Atlantic Monthly (July 1915) by Henry James
Boston Herald
