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 |
Your letter has just reached me, after countless forwardings. Five chunky pounds were the worst misfortune I got out of the Mesa Verde4. We5 had a rough twenty-four hours6, certainly, but I never learned so much in any other twenty-four hours, and most of it was glorious. Of course one would never knowingly go in for anything so difficult, no matter what the possible rewards, so it was good luck to have it thrust upon one, since we didn’t break any bones. If we had had such a mischance I don’t see how the men would have got us out in a week’s time. It is the worst canyon7 in Colorado8—I believe there are some in Utah9 even worse. I was on my horse again four days afterward, and I want to go right back into that canyon and be mauled about by its big brutality, though all my bruises are not gone yet. It’s a country that drives you crazy with delight, and that’s all there is to it. I can’t say anything more intelligible about it.
Mr. G.10 has sent me an advance copy of my book11; an example of the
worst proof-reading I’ve ever seen. Mostly my fault,
of course, but the Riverside Press is surely not blameless. “The be beauty born of murmuring
sound12” appears “the music born of etc.” I
don’t doubt it was so in the copy, but a proofreader ought to justify quotations.
There are a lot of others, quite as amusing. I am going to adopt a more sober method
of composition, and I’ll never hurry a book again. The result is too untidy. All Mr.
Greenslet’s work—cover type etc—is very satisfactory. The carelessness
is mostly up to me.
I got a lot of glorious photographs in the Southwest13—most of them belong to the President14 of the Denver & Rio Grande, but I hope I can
show them to you before I send them back to him15. They are the pick of hundreds of attempts; that in that light, and before such heights and
depths the camera becomes inarticulate—it stutters and it raves. What that
country waits for is a painter, but he’ll have to be a big one, with an egotism as
big as the Cliff Dwellers’16 was.
Otherwise he’ll only do colored photographs.
Have you see “A Boy’s Will”17 Elsie? I like it better
than “North of Boston”18; a good deal better. Let me
hear how my messy book strikes you when it comes along. I’m not a little anxious!
Now as I read it over, I wonder why it was so much [illegible] work!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0323.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0323
- 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
- September 21 [1915]
- Place letter was written
- Red Cloud, Nebraska, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
While exploring the canyons of Mesa Verde with an inexperienced guide, Cather and Edith Lewis were led to the bottom of a steep canyon without the necessary ropes to climb back up the same trail. After miles of walking, the women decided to wait while their guide, James Rickner, sought the camp of archeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes a few miles away. About 2:00 a.m., men arrived with a wagon to transport Cather and Lewis back to the camp, where they stayed until morning.
During this walk Cather and Lewis were in Soda Canyon and Cliff Canyon.
Referenced in Part VI, Chapter XI of The Song of the Lark, the sentence is an echo of William Wordsworth's lines from "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower": "And beauty born of murmuring sound / Shall pass into her face." The first edition of Cather's novel read, "...the music born of murmuring sound passed into her face, as the old poet said,—and into her body as well." It was not corrected in later editions.
Cather appears to be exaggerating. She very likely only received photos from Frank Wadleigh, the passenger traffic manager, not the president of the railroad.
Cather and Edith Lewis visited the Cliff Dweller ruins at Mesa Verde in Colorado in August 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.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
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.
Wadleigh, Frank Alonzo (1857-1933). Railroad passenger agent. Born in Clinton, IA, Wadleigh received his BS from the State University of Iowa in 1879 and began working for the Chicago Northwestern Railway in 1881. In 1882, he moved to Pueblo, CO, and began a long career with the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. In 1913, the railroad promoted Wadleigh to passenger traffic manager, a role in which he served until his retirement in 1927. As passenger traffic manager, he produced a series of illustrated guidebooks of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, including Beautiful Historical Taos: A Wonderland for Tourists (1916), in which he listed Cather as among the artists who visit Taos, NM. Wadleigh also provided information of the region and shared photographic prints of his promotional material with Cather.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
A Boy's Will (1913) by Robert Frost
North of Boston (1914) by Robert Frost
