Orrick Johns (November 17, 1922) | Willa Cather Archive

#0644: Willa Cather to Orrick Johns, November 17, 1922

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NUMBER FIVE BANK STREET³ November 17, 1922. My dear Mr. Johns¹:

How splendid of you to write me that nice letter! And I can't tell you how glad I am that you like Antonia⁴ and Claude⁵. You wouldn't have made a bad Sherlock Holmes⁶. You are the first sleuth who has dug the Parsifal⁷ theme out of Claude Wheeler--and I thought I had buried it so deep--deep! Yet, all through the first part of the book, I kept promising myself that I would put "The Blameless Fool, by Pity Enlightened"⁸ on the title page, where I eventually put a line⁹ from¹⁰ PVachel Lindsay¹¹. Now, either you or I did pretty well, when the theme got through to you out of absolute and consistent reticence.

I am going West next week to be gone until about the middle of January, but then I shall be home on Friday afternoons until I sail for France¹² in March. Won't you and Mrs. Johns¹³ please try to come in often on Fridays? You are such near neighbors now that it ought to be easy, and I enjoyed seeing you so much when you were here before.

Very cordially yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0644.xml
Letter identifier: 0644
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Orrick Johns ¹
Date letter was written: November 17, 1922
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (6494, etc.), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA

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.

A fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes was the popular protagonist in a series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, as well as in four of Doyle's novels.

Cather is loosely adapting lyrics from Wagner's opera.

Cather used this line from Lindsay's poem as an epigraph for One of Ours: "Bidding the eagles of the West fly on..."

Person Annotations

0371

Johns, Orrick (1887-1946). American poet and activist. Born in St. Louis, MO, the son of a newspaper editor, Johns attended the University of Missouri, then worked as a journalist and became a Marxist. Part of the new poetry movement, he moved to New York in 1911, publishing volumes of poetry in 1917, 1920, and 1926. He became an active member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, worked as a labor organizer, and wrote for the Daily Worker and the Masses. Painter Marguerite (Peggy) Baird, his first wife, divorced him in 1919 to marry Malcolm Cowley. He moved to California in 1929 and married twice more.

1639

Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931). American poet. Born in Springfield, IL, Vachel Lindsay attended Hiram College, the Chicago Art Institute, and the New York School of Art. Influenced by his family’s Carmelite religious tradition, he began writing visionary poetry he printed as broadsides and sold first on the streets of New York City and then while tramping around the country. He often returned to New York, where several volumes of his poetry were published. Lindsay was connected to many people in Cather’s circles of acquaintance—Lindsay is credited with introducing Earl Brewster to Achsah Barlow—and she used a Lindsay quotation as an epigraph for One of Ours (1922), but it is not clear whether she ever met him. Lindsay, who suffered from epilepsy and paranoid delusions, died by suicide.

1640

Mahon, Grace Wilson Johns (1893-?). Wife of Orrick Johns. Born in St. Louis, MO, to Charles A. Wilson and Alice Brady Wilson, Grace Wilson studied at the Washington University in St. Louis and then studied dramatic arts in New York City. In 1917, she married poet Orrick Johns just weeks after his divorce from his first wife, artist Marguerite Baird, was finalized. Cather was acquainted with Grace Johns, asking Orrick Johns to bring her to tea at Five Bank Street. In 1926 Grace Johns filed for divorce from Orrick Johns on grounds of adultery. In 1940, she married William J. Mahon.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

France

Work Annotations

My Ántonia (1918), by Willa Cather

One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather

Parsifal (July 26, 1882), by Richard Wagner

"Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan""The Campaign of Eighteen Ninety-Six, as Viewed at the Time by a Sixteen-Year-Old" (1919), by Vachel Lindsay