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 |
Great news—we4 have at last taken an apartment5, and are terribly busy fitting it up. I got back from Canada6 October 10th, but had to dash out to Chicago7 almost at once. I came back and signed the lease and began shopping for rugs & curtains, then had to go to Chicago again! But now most of the shopping is done, furniture got out of storage and set in place, cabinet-makers at work on bookshelves etc. We are staying right on at the Grosvenor and settling the new place slowly. Edith is desperately busy at the office, and if I shop for more than a few hours at a time I buy the most absurd things. We expect to move in about two weeks from now.
What do you think of Mrs. Austin8's book9? It's amazing how everybody mis-understood her and nobody ever "got the point". It's a big job to set out to be a genius in this ruthless age when even kings have to watch their step and pay their tailor bills. As for my base conduct10—you know why I went to the house for a few hours every day for about a week—merely to be polite. I had two perfectly good rooms at La Fonda11. And how the devil could I help it ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ that the first archbishops of New Mexico12 were French? As I don't wear a Spanish comb in my hair I didn't mind it a bit that Bishop Lamy13 was a Frenchman.
H. G. Wells14 threatened H. & M.15 with a libel suit16, sent furious cables, and they had to knock out his confession on Hampstead Heath and make new plates, but some thirty thousand had already got out.
Have you read Hemingway17's book18—of course you have. Don't you find it quite stunning? I don't see us getting to Mexico19 this winter. I simply have to have a dwelling place and my own books and things about me. Then I can travel in comfort and not feel like a tramp. Edith has wanted to write to you for a long while, but holding an important business job in N.Y.2 these days means working like fury. I hope she'll resign soon. She had a good long summer in Canada, about four months. At Grand Manan20, and at Jaffrey N.H.21 where I spent two weeks, all my friends were reading "Lorenzo"22. I'd have been bothered to death by the curious, so I shut 'em off by saying you had said what you wanted to say, and I had no authority to add an oral appendix.
Please write me again before you go away. I'm awfully excited about getting an apartment.
With love WillaNew address is 570 Park Avenue
(That's at the corner of Park & 63d, just behind
the Colony Club)
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1135.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1135
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf both.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mabel Dodge Luhan 1
- Date letter was written
- November 22 [1932]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by Willa Cather and Edith Lewis moving to 570 Park Avenue in December 1932 after an extended stay in the Grosvenor Hotel.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers (YCAL MSS 196), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Individual Annotations
Grosvenor Hotel (New York City): When Cather and Edith Lewis lost their 5 Bank Street apartment in 1927, they moved into the Grosvenor Hotel, where they continued to live until 1932. The hotel was located at 35 Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City.
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
Hotel La Fonda (Santa Fe, NM): Luxury hotel in Santa Fe, NM, which was built in 1922. The hotel was owned by the Atchison, Topeka Santa Fe Railway and managed by Fred Harvey when Cather and Edith Lewis stayed there in the summers of 1925 and 1926.
Houghton Mifflin, which published Austin's book.
Austin met H.G. Wells in England in 1911, an acquaintance that included walks on Hampstead Heath. In Earth Horizon, she reported that Wells proclaimed Rebecca West's pregnancy at a formal dinner in 1911 (West's and Wells' affair did not begin until 1913, and their son was born in 1914). After Wells threatened a libel suit, Austin revised the offending passage.
Person Annotations
Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879-1962). American patron of the arts and
memoirist. Born Mabel Ganson into a wealthy Buffalo, NY, family,
Mabel Evans traveled to Paris, France, in 1904 after the death of her first
husband. She met and married Edwin Dodge there and moved with him to a villa
in Florence, Italy, where they collected art and Mabel conducted a salon.
She moved to New York City in 1912 and separated from her husband soon after
(they divorced in 1916). In her Fifth Avenue apartment near Washington
Square, she reestablished her salon and supported modern art and radical
political causes. Cather may have known Mabel Dodge slightly during her New
York year but came to know her better in New Mexico, where she moved in 1917
with her third husband, Maurice Sterne, from whom she divorced in 1922.
Mabel married Antonio Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, in 1923. Thereafter she
called herself Mabel Dodge Luhan. When Cather and Edith Lewis traveled to
New Mexico in June 1925, Luhan invited Cather to visit her in Taos, seeking
advice on her manuscript memoirs of her life. Lewis and Cather’s long stay
in Taos inspired Death Comes for the Archbishop
(1927). Cather briefly returned to Luhan's Taos compound in 1926, when Luhan
was absent, and although Luhan invited Cather and Lewis back, they did not
return to New Mexico. In 1928, Cather encouraged Alfred Knopf to consider
publishing the early volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, praising them as “intensely
interesting and alive” (#2589). However, Harcourt Brace published all four
volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, Background (1933), European Experiences (1935), Movers
and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert
(1937). Cather also read the later portions in manuscript. Cather praised
Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence during his New Mexico years, Lorenzo in Taos (Knopf 1932), as “the best portrait
there ever will be of Lawrence” (#1036). Luhan lived in Taos until her
death.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Austin, Mary Hunter (1868-1934). American author and critic.
Born in Carlinville, IL, Mary Hunter received a BS from Blackburn
College in 1888, the same year she moved with her mother and siblings to
California’s San Joaquin Valley. In 1891 she married Stafford Wallace
Austin. In 1903, they separated (they divorced in 1915) and her collection
of California desert stories, The Land of Little
Rain, appeared. Between 1903 and 1924, Austin spent periods of time in
the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City; London, England; and
Carmel, CA; however, most of her literary output continued to focus on the
deserts of California and the Southwest. Cather may have met Austin as early
as 1910, and Austin’s poetry appeared in McClure’s
Magazine in 1911 and 1912. In February 1919 Austin wrote Ferris
Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, their mutual publisher, praising My Ántonia (1918) and asking for additional
information and materials to write an appreciation of Cather for El Palacio, a magazine published in Santa Fe, NM; her
essay appeared in 1920. When Cather and Edith Lewis travelled to the
Southwest in 1925, they saw Austin in New Mexico, where she had built Casa
Querida in Santa Fe in 1924. When Cather returned in 1926 to continue
research and writing of Death Comes for the
Archbishop (1927), Austin offered her the use of her empty house to
work in. Cather inscribed a copy of Archbishop “For
Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book,”
but she began denying that she had written any part of the novel in Casa
Querida after Austin published Earth Horizon (1932),
in which she called Cather’s celebration of French missionary priests a
“calamity” for Southwestern culture. Austin died at home two years later.
Lamy, Jean-Baptiste (1814-1888). French Roman Catholic Archbishop and missionary. Born in Lempdes in Auvergne, France, Jean-Baptiste Lamy attended the seminary of Clermont and then the seminary of Mont Ferrand, where he met fellow student Joseph Machebeuf. Lamy was ordained in 1838 and assigned to a parish in the town of Chapdes, France. In 1839, he and Machebeuf traveled to the U.S., where Lamy served at a parish in Danville, OH, for 8 years. In 1849, he was appointed the head of the newly formed Vicariate of New Mexico and appointed Machebeuf as his Vicar-General. Lamy finally arrived in New Mexico in 1851, where he conflicted with priests who had served under a Mexican bishop. The Vatican elevated Lamy to Archbishop of Sante Fe in 1875; he retired in 1884. During their 1925 trip to New Mexico, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis became interested in the lives of Lamy and Machebeuf, and Cather based Jean Marie Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) on Lamy.
Wells, H. G. (1866-1946). English writer. Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England to Joseph Wells and Sarah Neal. Wells is best known for his work as a science fiction writer, including novels, such as The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898), and short stories, such as “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1884) and “Empire of the Ants” (1905). He also wrote textbooks, biographies, journalistic pieces, and two war game manuals, Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913). Wells died in his home in London, England. Cather and Wells met when she visited London in 1909 to gather material for McClure’s Magazine, but there is no evidence of a sustained relationship.
Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961). American novelist. A member of
the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists who lived in France after
World War I, Ernest Hemingway is known for his stripped-down prose style and
his depictions of the war and its aftermath. Over the course of his career,
he published seven novels, six short story collections, and two works of
nonfiction. In a widely-quoted private letter to critic Edmund Wilson in
1923, Hemingway dismissed One of Ours (1922) because
Cather had no first-hand experience of the battlefield, while he served as
an ambulance driver, which influenced his accounts of the war. There is no
evidence that the two authors ever met, but Cather’s passing mentions of
Hemingway in her letters suggest she read his works and followed the
development of his career. After Cather's death, Hemingway went on to win
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 (which Cather won in 1923) and the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
Work Annotations
Earth Horizon (1932), by Mary Hunter Austin
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
Death in the Afternoon (1932), by Ernest Hemingway
Lorenzo in Taos (1932), by Mabel Dodge Luhan
