Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
"IN THE MOUNTAINS" HOWARD M. WING, MANAGER WERNERSVILLE, PA.2 April 20 Dearest Zoë1;
A few days after I came out of the hospital3 my doctor shipped me off to this sanitorium4 between Reading5 and Harrisburg6. It's in the middle of the Powkino Hills—beautiful forest country just coming green, with all the fruit trees and dogwood and redbud in flower. The place is luxuriously comfortable and the food vile. That's the U.S.A.7 for you; I pay sixty dollars a week, and can have the use of a ballroom, billiard room and six sun-parlors, but I can't get one vegetable that is not canned, or one meat not cold stored. I really need food, as I lost fifteen pounds in the hospital. I had a rough time, lost a lot of blood and couldn't swallow anything but liquids for eight days.
I don't see how you ever managed, the very day before you sailed, to stop at a shop
and send me a rose bush with your own hand. It bloomed violently
GALEN HALL
"IN THE MOUNTAINS"
HOWARD M. WING, MANAGER
WERNERSVILLE, PA. for a week, and only
shattered on the very day I left the hospital. I was mightily pleased and touched
that you thought of me in the last rushing hours of departure.
I'm reading my page proofs8 out here—at least I work two hours a day on them. There are beautiful walks all about, but I'm limited to two miles a day. I do walk a little more than that, but I am rather spent afterward. I shall stay a week longer if I can endure the food. It's an awful good thing to get off alone with your book before other people get at it. One sees things very much more clearly when one gets away from the routine of one's home9. I begin to feel, as you did last winter, that I want to live in a hotel. I'd like to live in a hotel in high mountains, with just such a drench of light as there is here—the light seems to pour through one and almost takes the place of food.
What a glorious time you'll be having when you get this. You'll have no time for
reading letters. This is just to report that I am still about on this GALEN HALL
"IN THE
MOUNTAINS"
HOWARD M. WING, MANAGER
WERNERSVILLE, PA. planet, and to thank you
for the lovely rose tree that bore me company in very forlorn hours. How did poor
Ethel Barrymore10 ever bear it;—for
the one liquid I could not take was alcohol in any form—it tied my tongue in a
bow-knot and burned my my throat beyond endurance.
I wonder what kind of a crossing you had—probably a good one, for you are naturally relaxed in the region of your diaphragm. It's nervous people who suffer most. I'm never so well anywhere as at sea, and I think it's so with most pleasure-loving people, and with people who live with a loose diaphragm. Of course, any trouble-hunter like Olive11 will find it at sea!
Drink my health in France12, please, Zoë. The Hambourgs13 are in Italy14, or they'd be popping down on you for news of me. A thousand good wishes and a great deal of love to you from
WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0586.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0586
- Contents
- Document is three leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Zoë Akins 1
- Date letter was written
- April 20 [1922]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by Cather's 1922 trip to Wernersville, PA, and the publication of One of Ours (1922).
- Place letter was written
- Wernersville, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Zoë Akins Papers, 1878-1959 (mssAU 1-5456), Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Individual Annotations
Cather was hospitalized for influenza in early April 1922.
Galen Hall, near Wernersvilla, PA, originated as a health resort in the late 19th century and by the 1920s featured a seven-story stone hotel and golf course.
Person Annotations
Akins, Zoë (1886-1958). American poet, playwright, and screenwriter.
Akins’ friendship with Cather started in 1909, when she submitted
verse to McClure’s magazine, which Cather rejected,
advising her to stay with playwriting. Akins subsequently moved from her
hometown of St. Louis, MO, to New York City and achieved success as a
playwright. She moved to California in the 1930s, adding screenwriting to
her accomplishments. Her play The Old Maid (1935), an
adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In
1932, Akins married Captain Hugh Rumbold, a British theatrical designer and
director; he died eight months later. Cather and Akins carried on a lifelong
correspondence, with Cather writing affectionate letters that included both
commentary on her own works and criticism of Akins’.
Barrymore, Ethel (1879-1959). American actress. Born into two
prominent acting families, the Barrymores and the Drews, Ethel Barrymore
made her stage debut in 1895. Known for her beauty, she became a star in
1901 in Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse
Marines, and went on to play many roles in comedies and serious
plays, occasionally co-starring with her brothers Lionel and John. One of
her lines, “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more,” became a popular
tag-line. Cather followed Barrymore’s career with interest but apparently
did not meet her.
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).
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.
Hambourg, Jan (1882-1947). Russian-born violinist; Isabelle
McClung’s husband. Hambourg moved with his family to Toronto,
Ontario, in 1910, where he was the head of the violin department at the
Hambourg Conservatory and performed as part of the Hambourg Trio. He married
Isabelle McClung in April 1916. Cather reacted negatively to both Hambourg
and the marriage, but she gradually came to accept him. Beginning in the
1920s, Hambourg left the family conservatory and focused on solo violin
performance in Europe. Cather enjoying long visits with Isabelle and Jan in
Toronto in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. She dedicated The Professor’s House (1925) to him (“For Jan, because he likes
narrative”) and asked him to make musical corrections to Lucy Gayheart (1935). When Isabelle died, Jan sent to Cather the
three hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather
destroyed them.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather
