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 |
I can never in this world thank you enough for you letter, or for giving poor Claude4 so much
feeling and sympathy. You say you find just what I tried so hard to make; a
narrative that is always Claude, and not me writing about either France5 or doughboys.No, I wasn't in France during the war. I went afterward6, after most of the F French part was written, to see whether, when I read it there, it would
seem 'descriptive' or impressionistic or knowing. After all, it's hard to write
about a country without description; and I didn't always keep to the narrow way; the
Beaufort7
part8 is still too fussy, too
'picturesque'. But there, you know all the difficulties as well as I do. I am sure
you find it better than it is. Someday I want to tell you how I got the material for
the last part- - - not easily. A great deal of living went into it. But for that
matter, there wasn't any other life for at least two of those three years. There was
only one question, ever; "How is Claude this morning? For nothing can be ill if he
be well." And that'ss just what one gets out of it;
that's the disease and the cure. But how it drains one- - - afterward, you don't
notice it at the time, thank God, you somehow always have enough to feed him till
he's done. But now, life does seem a casual affair. The new
one?9 Oh, it's an external affair. It's not Claude.
When the proofs come, I'll write you again; and thank you, thank you, thank you. It's now, when I can do nothing more on him, that I need to feel that he matters to someone else, that he can come into the room and make you care about him.
You'll never know how glad, how relieved, I am that you feel it's
solid work, under so much excitement. I've hammere
hammered away whole chapters, and there are still some that ought to go, like that
one10 about the shell bursting under
Claude.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0596.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0596
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. #0588, which has no opening or signature, may have been sent with this letter.
- 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. 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
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.
Cather traveled to France for about five months in 1920 to assist her writing of the novel.
In Book V of One of Ours, Claude and the other men of his company spend a delightful week in the French town of Beaufort, full of citizens grateful to have been liberated from German occupation by the Americans. "When the survivors of Company B are old men," Cather writes, "and are telling over their good days, they will say to each other, 'Oh, that week we spent at Beaufort!'"
Book V, Chapter XI of One of Ours.
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather
A Lost Lady (1923), by Willa Cather
