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 |
It was heartbreaking to miss you, when if I'd known the day before, or Thursday morning, I could have arranged it so easily. Josephine3 was ill4, so I sent her home and told her to go to bed, and I decided to devote the day to dismal chores. I left the house at ten, and had lunch and dinner up town, and didn't come home until nine at night. At that hour I was too beat out to go over to the pay station to telephone your mother5's apartment,- and by that time you were probably gone, or just getting ready for the train. It was an utterly wasted day, and the afternoon of it might have been so nice! Well, things have been going rather that way lately; the mechanics of life have been grinding hard since I got back from my wonderful time in the West6. However, it's silly to get discouraged; my cold is gradually departing, I've been hearing some glorious music, and behind the music a few comfortable ideas are stirring to make me feel that there is something worth--to me-- carrying one the routine for. The funny thing is that one can never make publishers and editors and friends see that with a story just forming you have to be alone like a thief hiding from the police,- alone with just the precious, cursed stuff you have stolen and are hiding from everybody. How much I owe to the non-success of those early books! I dropped them into the void and there was no come-back, no fuss, nothing to get in the way of the next one.
No lectures for me till I come back7 from France8, my dear! I've had to take on a secretary9 to take the people who want lectures off my back. She told me last week that she'd written nearly a hundred letters declining lectures for me in the last four months. People don't in the least want one to write--- perhaps what they really want is a vacation from having to bother about one's books at all. Well, Dorothy, they are not going to spoil things for me, so there! Be witness to my bold boast. I don't really mind not being read, (not a whoop, really--- some times a little fussed, but nothing deep.) But if they devil me so I can't write, they destroy my game, my fun, my reward, the whole splendour and glow of life,– all there is for me. And they shant do it, damn them! You'll stand by me, won't you, and understand that I'm not being disobliging?
Yours always WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0673.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0673
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher1
- Date letter was written
- [February 11, 1923]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Written in early to mid-February, before Cather contracted influenza, this letter was likely written the same day as #0671, as both mention Josephine Bourda's illness and Cather's recovery from her cold.
- 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
She was suffering from "inflammatory rheumatism" (#0671)
Cather had spent the month of December 1922 in Red Cloud, celebrating both Christmas and her parents' 50th wedding anniversary.
Cather sailed for France on 14 April 1923 and returned at the end of November the same year.
Significant variety in typing and layout styles suggest Cather employed a range of secretaries in the early 1920s before she hired Sarah J. Bloom.
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.
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.
Canfield, Flavia Camp (1844-1930). Clubwoman; painter; mother of Dorothy Canfield. Flavia Camp was born in Wisconsin, although her family came from Vermont. She was an early graduate of the University of Wisconsin and taught school and art before marrying James H. Canfield in 1873. Their son James A. Canfield was born in 1874, and their daughter Dorothy in 1879. A painter, Flavia studied in Europe, taking her daughter with her on several occasions. She was an activist and social reformer as well, believing in the power of women to effect change by organizing. She was one of the founders of the University of Nebraska Women’s Club, as well as the Ohio State Women’s Club and many others, and was president of the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs. Late in her life she wrote Around the World at Eighty (1926), an account of a world tour she took at that age.
Place Annotations
