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 |
This letter is not for publication, and writing to editors is certainly not a habit of mine.
But I find that after several weeks have gone by I still feel a wish to thank you
for
your letter3 to Mr.
Edmund Wilson4, which appeared in the
Review5 some time ago. I say thank you advisedly, because in that letter
you stated clearly things that I have felt very strongly and have never been able
to
formulate, even to myself. One knows that our actual lives are very little made up
of economic conditions. They affect us on the outside, but they certainly are not
what life means to you or to me or to the taxi driver, or to the elevator boys and
hall boys (all of whom I know very well) in the place
house6 where I live. Theories of economic reform and social
reconstruction really seem to interest nobody very much - except the men who write
about them and the men who have made it a
profession to be interested in them. Most, if not all of these students who burn
with zeal to reconstruct and improve human society, seem to lose touch with human
beings and with all the individual
needs and desires which make people what they are.
You probably remember that as an empiricist Tolstoi7 went even further than you go in your letter to Mr. Wilson. After spending most of his life in pondering how to make life better for men of high and low estate, he decided that the European desire to organize society efficiently was a mistake. And he repeats down ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩through the years that "the state8 of a man's mind has always been more important to him than the conditions of his life. It seems as if there were some antithesis between efficient organization and the best there is in mankind; as though, in a highly organized, extremely efficient society, men cease to think truly or feel deeply." Of course, Tolstoi tried to be a Marxist and failed; of course, he is very much out of date and out of fashion now, but certainly no one ever took the puzzle of human life more to heart or puzzled over it more agonizingly,- not even the New Republic9.
It quite heartens one to have a man come out and say frankly, as you did, that it seems natural to regard the world immediately about one as made up of individuals rather than of "masses": and that human history and human experience, and the human needs we know to be strongest in ourselves and in our friends, make the most reliable data we have as to what really comprises happiness and well-being in individuals and large collections of individuals.
Please excuse me if I seem to be trying to write your editorial back at you, for I know very well I could not improve upon it.
Very sincerely yours, Willa Cather
