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 am so glad that you have a place3 you love, with gardens and fountains, and that beautiful view of the mountain ridge. It always brings me peace to think that when the world is full of misery and madness, you can shut yourself up there and forget that the heritage of all the ages is being threatened. I have not succeeded in providing myself with such a retreat, and I realize that not to have done so is one kind of failure. For years and years an escape to a wild little island4 in the North Atlantic (with plenty of hardships, but absolute freedom) satisfied me absolutely. I love raw fogs and heavy storms from the sea better than a mild climate like yours - Oh, much better. But the hardships have grown to be a little more of a strain, and there is no way to "civilize" and modify the place without spoiling the very thing I love there.
Yes, I am glad you have your safe kingdom in this terrifying world. But, Zoe,
I am not gald
glad that you wrote STARVATION ON RED RIVER5. It is the only play of
yours that I have ever read with no pleasure at all. I read it carefully, and I could not once detect your
voice - it all sounded like something through a loud speaker. I don't think
you belong in the Dust Bowl. The characters
just don't come through to me as individuals; they seem made to fit certain
situations. I cannot believe that a successful business man, a grown up man
of the world, would ever find any pleasure in hiding ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩
his roll of money away in a niche where he used to put his pennies as a
little boy. The situation which results from his doing such a thing, seems to me forced and
improbable, as does the behaviour of the small boy,
Harry.
No matter how many melodramatic situations a play flashes on one, I doubt whether it can have a very strong dramatic interest unless the audience can have a very strong personal interest, either admiration or affection, for at least one of the characters. Lately we have had ever so many plays which tried to get on without this, and they have none of them been good plays. "The Little Foxes"6 is the most recent example. Nobody cares a hang what happens to any of the characters in that shocking play - one would like to see the whole bunch massacred, so that one could go home. And in this play, from you of all people, I can't find a single person who either you or I can get worked up about. Pearl, least of all. She just doesn't seem to me a real person. And the lion doesn't seem to me a real lion. Why, pages of dialogue are wasted on that damned Lion!
What I am trying to say, Zoe, is that you were trying to write a play against
your natural sympathies. I can't help feeling that you hated writing it. So
much of the dialogue is devoted to explaining and apologizing accounting for illogical situations;
one action does not develop naturally out of another, and somehow the action
never seems to go with the word. You never before wrote a play without
any
no real feeling in it, and I hope
to Heaven you never will again. Don't do it, write your own kind of thing.
Leave bloody lion tamers to skirts like
Lillian Hellman7. Please don't
be angry with me, but this play really hurt my feelings and made me
sad.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1474.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1474
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Zoë Akins 1
- Date letter was written
- February 15, 1940
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Zoë Akins Papers, 1878-1959 (mssAU 1-5456), Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Individual Annotations
Green Fountains, Akins's house in Pasadena, CA, was famous for its lushly-planted grounds.
Person Annotations
Akins, Zoë (1886-1958). American poet, playwright, and screenwriter.
Akins’ friendship with Cather started in 1909, when she submitted
verse to McClure’s magazine, which Cather rejected,
advising her to stay with playwriting. Akins subsequently moved from her
hometown of St. Louis, MO, to New York City and achieved success as a
playwright. She moved to California in the 1930s, adding screenwriting to
her accomplishments. Her play The Old Maid (1935), an
adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In
1932, Akins married Captain Hugh Rumbold, a British theatrical designer and
director; he died eight months later. Cather and Akins carried on a lifelong
correspondence, with Cather writing affectionate letters that included both
commentary on her own works and criticism of Akins’.
Hellman, Lillian Florence (1905-1984). American playwright, screenwriter, and activist. Born in New Orleans, LA, daughter of Max Hellman and Julia Newhouse Hellman, Lillian Hellman was raised alternately in New Orleans and New York City, where she attended college. She married playwright Arthur Kober in 1925; they divorced in 1932. While working as a reader in Hollywood, CA, in 1929, Hellman met detective story writer Dashiell Hammett and maintained a relationship with him until his death in 1961. Her play, The Children’s Hour (1934), ran for nearly 700 performances on Broadway; she wrote the screenplay for it and for other movies in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1939 her biggest success, The Little Foxes, had a long Broadway run and was also filmed, as were her later plays such as Watch on the Rhine (1941). Hellman belonged to the U.S. Communist Party in the late 1930s; she was subsequently blacklisted for this and defended herself during the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s. Cather evidently saw The Little Foxes and disliked it very much.
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
Work Annotations
Starvation on Red River (1939), by Zoë Akins
The Little Foxes (1939), by Lillian Hellman
