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 proofs3 have come, dear Dorothy1, and God reward you for your comments, for I can't. There is so much I want to tell you about. So many of your queries will help me to better it.
Yes, the English had independent guns that wandered about, I know the captain of one
of them. I could never tell you what work I put in on these details. I got a great
deal of it in the hospital here, winter of 1918, when a lot of Western boys lay here
in the Polyclinic4 all winter with no
one to talk to and were so glad to talk to me. Such clear, vivid memories come back
to sick men. The young captain who killed the degenerate German officer didn't know
what it meant5, that was why I used
it, it see seemed so sweet. He had his wonderful
rings etc. I spent a large prt of that winter listening to quiet memories,,—like
that about the terrible little girl6 and
the horrid baby7.
The For the transport part8 I had the diary of a New
Hampshire9
doctor10 who was on one of the worst influenza
transports. How that diary came into my hands is a story that would thrill you as
a
writer. Every one of those episodes is chosen from many, many, which all reinforced
it. They nearly all cost somebody's blood, and they cost a good deal of mine. You
have to give out a whole lot to make people remember aloud to you. I saw many, many
well ones, too, here and in Canada11,; but the sick ones often talked like men in a dream, softly remembering
dead lives.
No, Dorothy, our men went into action at Chateau Thierry12 on the 31st of May, 1918, and the Marines marched in Paris13 on the Fourth of July.
There are a hundred things I'd like to tell you the how and why of, and as I'm going over these proofs I'll write again.
But how I laughed when you lighted upon Claude
and David's violin14. That, my dear, I didn't get from any soldier boy.
That was the way you made me feel when we were in
France15 together that time16; and that, was the way that I made my poor cousin17 feel. You never meant to, you
couldn't know it? Neither could David ,! neither could I, when Grosvenor's lips used to twitch and curl. It's
the way helpless ignorance always feels, and so many of the best of ours felt it in
France. This book gathered up everything,; even you did not escape, you
see.
All the same, it's a war book, and most of my few readers, even, won't give it a chance.
But of all these things, much more hereafter.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0588.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0588
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. As this letter has no opening or signature, it may have been sent with #0596.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher1
- Date letter was written
- [April 25, 1922]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
This letter follows #0585, after Canfield Fisher had read the entirety of One of Ours and returned the second set of proofs. Cather returned to New York from Pennsylvania on Monday, April 24, and likely wrote this letter the following day.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Dorothy Canfield Collection (mss-975), University of Vermont, Bailey-Howe Library, Burlington, VT
Individual Annotations
The New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital opened in 1882 and moved to a facility at 341-351 West 50th Street in 1912. Between 1918 and 1922, the Polyclinic Hospital was used exclusively for U. S. Army patients.
In Book V of One of Ours, Claude and his comrades kill a German officer who wears a miniature case around his neck which holds a painting of "a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes." Claude suggests the young man is the officer's younger brother and does not understand he is the officer's lover.
In Book V of One of Ours, Claude meets a traumatized child, a refugee from Belgium, who is staying with the Joubert family in France.
In Book V of One of Ours, Claude and his fellow soldier come across a woman, dying of tuberculosis, who struggles to feed her "white and sickly" infant.
Book IV of One of Ours, titled "The Voyage of the Anchises."
In Book V of One of Ours, Claude is envious of his friend David Gerhardt's skill as a violinist. Observing him play, Claude "was torn between generous admiration, and bitter, bitter envy."
Cather spent time with Dorothy Canfield in Europe in the summer of 1902.
Person Annotations
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958). American novelist; educational
and social reformer. Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather became
friends in 1891 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Canfield's
father, James Canfield, had come to serve as Chancellor. The family moved to
Columbus, OH, in 1895 when James Canfield assumed the presidency of Ohio
State University, from which Dorothy graduated in 1899. She then followed
her father to New York City, where he became Librarian of Columbia
University, and she pursued graduate study in Romance Languages at the
University of Paris and Columbia, from which she earned a PhD in 1904. On
Cather’s first trip to Europe, she spent time in France and England with
Canfield, including an awkward visit to the home of poet A.E. Housman.
Cather derived the central character of “The Profile” (1907) from Canfield’s
friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met in Europe. Cather and Canfield
became estranged for more than a decade because Canfield objected to the
story’s planned inclusion in The Troll Garden (1905).
Canfield married John Redwood Fisher in 1907, and their primary residence
was Arlington, VT. Canfield Fisher had spent 1916-1918 in France engaging in
war relief work, and Cather’s consultation with her about the accuracy of
her depiction of wartime France in One of Ours (1922)
led them to reconcile. In 1925 Canfield Fisher became a founding member of
the Book of the Month Club selection committee. She published her novels
(most of them very popular) under the name Dorothy Canfield but her various
nonfiction works as Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Sweeney, Frederick C. (1872-1949). American physician. Born
in New York, Frederick Sweeney took his medical degree from the University
of Vermont in 1895. He married in 1898, and he and his wife Eva Sweeney had
five children. He established a practice in Jaffrey, NH, by 1900, leaving it
to serve with the Army Medical Corps during World War I. After his return to
Jaffrey in 1919, he was called to treat Cather, who had contracted
influenza. Cather borrowed the diary he had kept during the war, and used,
without his knowledge, many of its details in writing part 4 of One of Ours (1922). Cather and Sweeney kept in touch
on her subsequent visits to Jaffrey.
Cather, Grosvenor Perry (1883-1918) (“G.P.”). Cather’s cousin.
G.P. Cather was born in Catherton, NE, the oldest son of Frances and
George Cather. He attended Grand Island Baptist College and the University
of Nebraska in Lincoln but was a poor student and did not earn a degree. He
married his childhood friend Myrtle Bartlett in 1910. Restless and
unsuccessful both before and after his marriage, he joined the Nebraska
National Guard in 1914 and served under General John J. Pershing on the
Mexican border in 1916. He became a member of the Allied Expeditionary Force
in 1917 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He died in action in
Cantigny, France, on May 28 and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished
Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre. Willa Cather read his letters home to
his mother about his experiences in the army, and she modeled Claude
Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours (1922), on
G.P. His body was first buried in a military cemetery in France, where
Cather visited his grave in 1920. In 1921, a large military funeral marked
the reinterment of his remains in Bladen, NE.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather
