Cyril Clemens (January 28, 1938) | Willa Cather Archive

#1395: Willa Cather to Cyril Clemens, January 28, 1938

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ January 28, 1938. My dear Mr. Clemens¹:

Mr. Lamy³ who wrote you is a great nephew of Archbishop Lamy⁴, who is the central character in my book DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP⁵. I have always understood that this old Mr. Lamy is a worthy man, but I have never talked to him, or even, to my knowledge, seen him. I have always found that if one wishes to get reliable information about remarkable men, their relatives are the last persons to consult. sSo I have never interviewed Miguel Lamy. I am sending you a pamphlet⁶ in which I state very definitely why and how I wrote DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. In this article I gave my historical sources, concerning the life of Archbishop Lamy. I think you have written me once before⁷ about Miguel Lamy, but I really know nothing about him except that he was one of several distant relatives who came over to this country after Archbishop Lamy was already ~~a rather~~ an old man.

Very sincerely yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1395.xml
Letter identifier: 1395
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Cyril Clemens ¹
Date letter was written: January 28, 1938
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

See #1362.

Person Annotations

0266

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.

1848

Lamy, Miguel (c. 1860-1938). American laborer. Lamy was born in the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso located on the Rio Grande River in northern New Mexico and was reportedly adopted by Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy when he was found injured. In 1898, Lamy married Mercedes Ramirez, with whom he had five children. For much of his life, he lived near Santa Fe, NM, working variously as a hunter, a rancher, and a salesman. In 1936, the Santa Fe New Mexican purported that Lamy inspired the character Jacinto in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

1067

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.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather

"Letter from Willa Cather to the Editor of the Commonweal, A," Commonweal (November 27, 1927), by Willa Cather