Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
Ever since the first number of John
Buchan's3
autobiography4
came out5 in the Atlantic6, I have wanted to tell you
how fine I think it is and to congratulate you upon having secured such a
book of sanity and comfort for us all. On this most dreadful and
discouraging of days, June 10th, I had the chapter "Bright Company" for my
companion at teatime. The world and life he brings before me seems almost as
far away as the world of Vergil7's
eEclogues8.
As you know, I have been blamed as an
"escapist"9,- indifferent and
selfish. But there are things one cannot escape. And I think none of the
personal sorrows I have lived through have ever shaken my days and nights as
has the gloom (doom?) which has been gathering for the last few months10 over almost
everything that has made the world worth living in or living for. You are
one of the people who I know feels as I do; but the strange thing is that almost everyone
feels it in some degree. My doctor tells me that the patients in the
hospitals are very much affected by it, and their wish to get well seems to flag. He will not let me go
over to Philadelphia11 on the 12th to
take a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, because I am so slow in
recovering from a recent illness. But I write chiefly to thank you for telling me about Buchan's
autobiography, which I might have missed when so many distracting and
devastating things are happening in the world,
⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ and to all my friends
abroad.
P.S. This seems a foolish personal request to make when I really care so
little about personal things just now: but since ANTONIA12 is still selling, and since I am
still perpetually receiving letters about her, I do wish you would send
to the Riverside Press for a copy of the current edition. I lately sent
for several, to present to my nurses at the French Hospital13, and I was shocked to find on
what poor, thin paper14
the book is now
it was printed. The trouble is that
since the letters on page 5 show through the paper and cloud the text on
page 6, the book is now very hard to read. I have always found that the
principal objection to cheap editions, like the old Dent "Everyman" books15, and the "Giants" of the Modern Library16, is that one
side of every leaf shows through the paper and clouds the next, so that
there is not a clear page in the book on
which the eye can rest with satisfaction or read without a certain
amount of disquieting effort.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1484.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1484
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- June 10, 1940
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MS Am 1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Three chapters (in slightly different form and with different titles) of Buchan's autobiography appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in May (one chapter) and June (two chapters) 1940 shortly before Houghton Mifflin published the book.
Cather is referring to negative reviews in the 1930s that accused her of retreating from contemporary social problems into the past, accusations she responded to in "Escapism," published in the 17 April 1936 Commonweal.
Hitler's forces invaded Denmark and Norway in April and May 1940 and commenced the "blitzkrieg" against the Netherands and Belgium in May 1940. On 13 May 1940, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of Great Britain. British and French troops under attack at Dunkirk were successfully extracted on 26 May.
In 1881 the French Hospital, established by the Société Française de Bienfaisance, opened at 131 West 14th Street, New York. In 1929 the hospital opened locations at 324-240 West 30th Street. Willa Cather stayed at the hospital in the spring of 1940 and returned in December that same year. Cather enjoying being surrounded by the French language and felt the hospital was an "escape from the active world" (#1514).
On 13 June 1940, Greenslet informed Cather that the novel would, in future, be printed from the collected edition plates, making the type clearer, and he would try to get it printed on better paper.
A series of inexpensive reprints of books in the Western canon begun by publisher J.M. Dent of London in 1905.
Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop appeared in a Modern Library edition (see #1130 and #1609).
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.
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.
Virgil (70BCE-19 BCE). Roman poet, author of the Aeneid and Georgics. As a girl in Red Cloud, NE, Willa Cather studied Virgil with William Ducker, an educated Englishman who was a businessman in the town; when she continued her studies of Latin and Greek at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she read with him in the summers. Virgil’s influence is apparent in Cather’s poems in April Twilights (1905), and Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia (1918), studies Virgil at the University of Nebraska with Gaston Cleric. Jim experiences a key moment of insight when reading Virgil’s Georgics, and a quotation from the Georgics (“Optima dies . . . prima fugit”: The best days are the first to flee) appears as an epigraph to Cather’s novel.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Pilgrim's Way (1940) by John (Lord Tweedsmuir) Buchan
Atlantic Monthly
The Eclogues by Virgil
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
