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 came home2 two weeks ago to find that a
letter from you had been awaiting me a long while; and your letter proves to be just
one more trouble in life.! It is a trouble because it would give me
real pleasure to send a contribution to your hospital, but the truth is, Mabel, that
dozens of old friends of mine out in Nebraska3 are absolutely on the edge of want. For five years, the
drought there has been absolute and unbroken. The farm women I have known all my
life have raised no potatoes, no gardens, no grain of any kind, no pigs, and some
of
them have had to kill their chickens because they could not buy the grain to feed
even chickens. I am sending them every bit of money I can spare - send them
provisions through the home butcher and grocery store. Yesterday, I sent off two
great boxes of blankets and warm clothes. I am cutting Christmas out for everybody,
except for those destitute people. The farm relief seems to operate successfully
only for the loafers, and the New Deal has cut my income down to one-fourth of what
it formerly was. You have probably had the same experience, if your investments were
in government bonds and industrial concerns, as mine were.
This is prosaic stuff to write, but it is to explain why I do not answer your letter with a check for the hospital. I hope things are not as desperate in New Mexico4 as they are in Nebraska, and that you and the pueblo will have a Happy Christmas. Edith5 and I both send much love to you and many good wishes.
Yours, WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1340.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1340
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mabel Dodge Luhan1
- Date letter was written
- December 18, 1936
- 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
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.
Place Annotations
