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 |
Replying to your post-card of August 27th, let me say that I do not know to whom the initials "F. S."3 refer.
But further, let me say that I never in my life called on anyone in Bronx Park4. I have never been in Bronx Park, though that may seem rather strange. Miss Tarbell5 and I never took anybody to tea parties6. Miss Tarbell and I sometimes have tea together, but neither of us ever made a practice of going to literary teas. I am just leaving town for California7, but I wish you would drop a line to Miss Bloom8 and give her the name of the very untruthful person9 whom you indicate by initials on your card.
Very sincerely yours, Willa S. Cather By Sarah J. Bloom Room 1202, 7 Dey Street, New York2.Dictated by Miss Cather The man to whom I referred in poor writing was Ford Maddox Ford.
Cyril Clemens
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1373.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1373
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Cyril Clemens 1
- Date letter was written
- September 27, 1937
- 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 (#6494-6494-i), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Individual Annotations
As Clemens's note at the bottom of the letter suggests, he referred to "F.F" (Ford Ford) and Cather could not read his handwriting.
In Ford Madox Ford's memoir Return to Yesterday (1932), he tells a story (certainly pure fabrication) about meeting a woman in Paris who tells him that twenty years earlier, he changed the course of her life because she was invited to tea with Ford and Cather at Bronx Park, and the tea lasted so long she did not make her appointed meeting with a married man with whom she intended to elope.
In Return to Yesterday, Ford represents Cather and Tarbell as working at McClure's at the same time (which they did not) and describes them as spending their time at tea parties.
Person Annotations
Clemens, Cyril (1902-1999). American biographer. A distant cousin of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), Cyril Clemens was born in St. Louis, MO, to James R. and Kathryn T. Clemens, and received his BA and MA from Washington University (St. Louis). He founded the International Mark Twain Society in 1930 and edited its journal, the Mark Twain Quarterly, from 1936-1982. He wrote biographies and biographical sketches of his famous cousin and other literary figures, including G.K. Chesterton and A.E. Housman. The Mark Twain Society awarded a medal to Cather in 1934; Clemens asked Cather for contributions to the journal and pressed her for information about her 1902 visit to Housman.
Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist
and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County,
PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough
Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling
in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly
taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the
Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing
and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France,
studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was
hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon
Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she
would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work
for McClure’s, The History of the
Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S.
McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with
fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the
competing American Magazine, where she worked until
1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather
arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was
still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two
women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm
she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived
with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other
in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to
Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in
Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.
Bloom, Sarah J. (1889-1961). Cather's personal secretary. Born in New York in 1889 to Russian immigrants Solomon and Bertha Bloom, Sarah J. Bloom worked for Cather from some time in the 1920s until Cather's death and continued to work for Edith Lewis on matters pertaining to Cather's literary estate thereafter. Bloom typed Cather's literary manuscripts and managed Cather's correspondence, typing dictated letters and sometimes responding for Cather when she was traveling. Bloom’s work for Cather supplemented full-time office employment in New York City (for many years she worked for the New York State Public Service Commission). She thus came to Cather and Lewis's apartment on weekends to take dictation, pick up and deliver typescripts, and deliver typed letters for signature. She died in New York city in 1961.
Ford, Ford Madox (1873-1939) (“Ford Madox Heuffer”). British author, editor, and critic. Born in Surrey, England, Ford Madox Heuffer was brought up in London. In 1894 he eloped with his school friend Elizabeth Martindale, whose father opposed their marriage. The couple had two daughters and lived in Winchelsea, where Ford Hueffer befriended many local authors, including Joseph Conrad, with whom he collaborated on Romance (1903), a novel about pirates. After a 1904 breakdown, he spent time in Germany; on his return to England, he lived mostly in London, apart from his wife and children, and established the English Review. His novel The Good Soldier (1915) established his reputation as a novelist, but his complicated romantic life and his wife’s refusal to grant him a divorce undermined his personal reputation. After serving in the British Army during World War I, in 1919 he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford. He lived in the Provence region of France during the 1920s, and then in the U.S. from 1929 until his death. On a 1909 trip to London for McClure’s Magazine, Cather met Heuffer and was disappointed that he failed to arrange a promised meeting between her and Conrad. Ford’s account of Cather’s time at McClure’s in his memoir Return to Yesterday (1932) contains multiple obvious errors, and Cather disputed the accuracy of his account of her 1902 meeting with A.E. Housman.
Place Annotations
