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 wrote this note yesterday, lost it in the mass of things on my desk, and have just found it. So you get two!
W— ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ Monday Dear Elizabeth1:I got home2 from New Brunswick4 only last night, so I’ve missed you altogether. But it was a delight to find your letter. I am so glad you liked it—Claude5, I mean. For the present he seems to have no existence as a story, but as an expression of opinion about War! My desk is piled with letters from Pacifists: one tells me that I will be forevermore forever-more “a woman stained with Crime”! Apparently, if a story touches the political opinions of people, they can’t see it as an imaginative thing at all. It’s as if a pianist, in the middle of a sonata, began to play “The Watch on the Rhine”6—in war time! Everyone forgets he was playing a sonata!
Hastily and affectionately WillaJosephine7 is back and we are struggling to get the house clean and to keep the Pacifists from eating us up!
NUMBER FIVE BANK STREET8 Tuesday Dear Elizabeth:I returned from New Brunswick only yesterday, to find that you had been in
town again and that I had missed you. I am delighted that you like Claude,”
however. I’ve never tried to do anything that took so much out of me; nor
anything that was so absorbing and exciting to do. I miss it
terribly—terribly! It determined almost every action in my life for so
long that now I hardly know where to turn. The Pacifists have come at me
like a swarm of hornets. It’s disconcerting to have Claude regarded as a
sentimental glorification of War, when he’s so clearly a farmer boy, neither
very old nor very wise. I tried to treat the war without any attempt at
literalness—as if it were some war away back in history, and I was
only concerned with its effect upon one boy. Very few people seem able to
regard it as a story—it’s friends as well as its foes will have it the story a presentation of “the American soldier”, whereas its only the story of one. I wanted to call it merely “Claude” but the
publisher9 and everyone else was
against me. However, I do think its a good book and that it will live through the controversy as an
imaginative work and not a piece of reporting.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0620.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0620
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto of each leaf only. Cather wrote two letters on different days and sent them in the same handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Moorhead Vermockren1
- Date letter was written
- [September 18 and 19, 1922]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1342.3), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
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.
Person Annotations
Vermorcken, Elizabeth Moorhead (c.1866-1955). American writer and academic. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Elizabeth Moorhead married Frederick Vermorcken in 1891, although the marriage did not last long, and she soon returned to Pittsburgh. In 1910 she began an eighteen-year teaching career as an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh while also writing short stories and articles that appeared in national magazines. After retiring from teaching in 1928, she wrote three novels. After moving to Florence, Italy, in the 1930s, she began writing The Whirling Spindle (1942), about her family and friends in Pittsburgh, where she returned after Italy’s entry into WWII. Vermorcken likely met Cather in Pittsburgh in 1905, and they remained friends after Cather moved to New York City. Vermorcken wrote the first biographical account of Cather’s Pittsburgh years, These Too Were Here: Louise Homer and Willa Cather (1950).
Bourda, Joséphine Marie Bernardine Brun (1892-1959). Cather’s maid. Raised in Lourdes in the Pyrénées region of France, Joséphine’s father Jean-Marie Brun ran a restaurant. In 1909 she married Alphonse Bourda, and they had two children, Marie, born 1910, and Clémentine, born 1912. In 1913 Joséphine, Alphonse, and Joséphine’s father immigrated to the U.S., leaving Marie and Clémentine behind with relatives. Alphonse and Joséphine’s third child, Jeanette, was born in New York City in late 1913. Soon after, Joséphine found work cooking and keeping house for Willa Cather and Edith Lewis in their Five Bank Street apartment. In 1919 the Bourda family was reunited in New York and Joséphine stopped working, but by late 1921, she was back working half days until sometime after 1925. She resumed working for Cather and Lewis in 1932 when they moved to a new apartment at 570 Park Avenue, but in 1935, she and her husband decided to return to France because of his failing health. Cather considered Joséphine a personal friend and praised her as “an artist in her way” (#0563). Cather and Bourda evidently corresponded after her return to France but their letters have not surfaced. She died in the village of Saint Pé de Bigorre.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather
"Die Wacht am Rhein" (1854), by Max Schneckenburger and Karl Wilhelm
