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 |
It was a friendly thing of you to write me3 a kind letter about Quebec4 when the days were very dark. I had my passage to Naples5 engaged for this week. Isabelle6 and I were looking forward to this reunion, the first since 1935.
Yes, I shall always be glad to think that there is a set of my books in Quebec, and that the place itself recalled my story to both you and Lord Tweedsmuir7. His Augustus8 gave me great pleasure last spring, and was one of the last books I sent on to Isabelle, in Sorrento9.
On Monday I go up to Jaffrey10 for a few weeks, to work on the book11 which three times has been interrupted by death. I can't expect much of myself, can I? The three12 most important people13 in my life have left me within five months.
Thank you again for your letter.
Faithfully yours Willa Cather October 27thP.S. I am not going away to struggle with anything, but to soothe and steady myself with the activity which steadies me more than anything else.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1422.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1422
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- October 27 [1938]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by corresponding letters from Houghton Mifflin staff.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
On 17 October 1938, Greenslet wrote about his visit to Quebec "last June" on a fishing trip, on which Lord Tweedsmuir was his companion. He reported to Tweedsmuir that he was overcome with memories of Shadows on the Rock, and Tweedsmuir reported the same sensation, and that Cather was "the only contemporary American novelist that he could really read." On his return to Boston, Greenslet sent Tweedsmuir the Autograph Edition of Cather's works. Greenslet hypothesized that Tweedsmuir would leave the set in Quebec when his five-year appointment concluded.
Douglass Cather and Isabelle McClung Hambourg both died in 1938, but a third has not been identified.
Person Annotations
Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer.
Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from
Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as
associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to
1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children,
Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized
in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston
publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially
and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett,
who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to
submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published
novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief
of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of
the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as
partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet
negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent
from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became
a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department
in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of
her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and
undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters
to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.
Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime
friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially
prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress
Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to
reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to
live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of
Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung
accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved
to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh,
finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited
New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also
rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together
to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father,
Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist
Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in
1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the
Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather
and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and
1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S.
for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her
death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving
her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work,
through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After
Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to
Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few
letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.
Buchan, John, Baron Tweedsmuir (1875-1940). Scottish novelist and
politician. Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University,
Buchan pursued his writing career, at the same time as his political career
led to serving in South Africa, in Parliament, and in the British army in
World War I. In 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada and
elevated to the peerage; that same year Alfred Hitchcock made one of
Buchan’s most popular books, The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915), into a film. Buchan also wrote histories, biographies, and a 1940
memoir Memory Hold-the-Door (published as Pilgrim’s Way in the U.S.), which Cather read at the
suggestion of Ferris Greenslet, a friend of Buchan.
Cather, Charles Douglas (1880-1938) (“Douglass”). Cather’s
brother. Born in Virginia and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Charles
was third child and second son of Charles and Virginia Cather. As an
adolescent, Douglass Cather helped his father supervise rented farm
properties and worked as a messenger for the local Burlington & Missouri
Railroad office. In 1897 he left Red Cloud for a position in Sterling, CO,
and then took a position with at the Cheyenne, WY, office of the Burlington
Railroad. In 1908 he traveled to Mexico, an experience that his sister gave
to Emil Bergson in O Pioneers! (1913). By 1910 he was
working for the Santa Fe railroad and living in Winslow, AZ, where Willa
Cather visited him in 1912. He later achieved success in the oil business in
California. Although he never married, Cather notes that during the last six
or seven years of his life he had a relationship with Dorothy Rogers.
Douglass visited Cather in New York City in December of 1937. His death in
June 1938 left her devastated. Douglass served as a prototype for one of the
twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932) and Hector
the messenger boy brother in “The Best Years” (1948). His years working for
the Burlington also inspired Cather’s many railroad worker characters in her
novels, including Song of the Lark (1915) and The Professor’s House (1925). Few letters from this
important sibling relationship have survived.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Augustus (1937) by John (Lord Tweedsmuir) Buchan
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) by Willa Cather
