Henry Seidel Canby (February 4, 1941)

#1524: Willa Cather to Henry Seidel Canby, February 4, 1941

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ February 4, 1941. Dear Mr. Canby¹:

I want to explain why I have not replied to any of the letters and invitations which told me of the interesting things the Academy³ is doing. Since the middle of November, I have been incapacitated by a injury to my right hand⁴, which kept me in the French Hospital⁵ for the month of December. My hand is still in splints, when it is not under massage. But for the last few days I have been able to write my signature, which is an encouraging advance.

May I take this occasion to express my appreciation of your review⁶ of my new book⁷? I know that a reviewer has to take some pains to see what the writer of a book was really trying to do⁸. Naturally, I feel very appreciative of such a clear statement as yours of just what I was trying to do in Sapphira.

I am ~~just~~ as uncertain as you about the ending of the book, and I dislike the jump from the third person to the first person⁹. But Nancy's return, which I witnessed in just the fashion I describe was really the live core of the story. If I had not seen the meeting between my old nurse and her daughter, and heard, during Nancy's visit, so much of their talk about the old times before the war, I never would have written the story. The narrative worked round in a circle, and its end was really it's beginning. It may interest you to know that at one time I thought of using a subtitle like this: SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL
(A Conversation Piece)

Of course, the idea wasn't very practical from a publishing point of view. When I saw the title of your review, I thought this ~~was~~ a coincidence which was flattering to us both.

Faithfully yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1524.xml
Letter identifier: 1524
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Henry Seidel Canby ¹
Date letter was written: February 4, 1941
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Henry Seidel Canby Papers (YCAL MSS 64), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT

Individual Annotations

The American Academy of Arts and Letters

Cather significantly injured a tendon in her right thumb in November 1940 after signing hundreds of copies of her novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Her right hand was immobilized for months afterward, and the pain recurred often in later years.

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).

Likening Sapphira and the Slave Girl to Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931), Canby praised Cather for "not writing melodrama" but rather "recreating, with subtle selection and incident, a society and a culture and a sociology in which a conflict of morals and of philosophies produces an inner, ever more tightly-coiled spring."

In the final section of the novel ("Nancy's Return"), Cather switches to first-person narration, recalling her own experiences as a child. Canby notes in passing that "the survivors" of "the wreck of a slave-owning society" are "seen by a little girl a whole generation after."

Person Annotations

0291

Canby, Henry Seidel (1878-1961). American critic and editor. Born to a prominent Wilmington, DE, family, Canby received a BA (1899) and PhD (1905) from Yale University. He began teaching English at Yale in 1900 and was editor of the Yale Review from 1911 to 1922. In 1920 he founded the Literary Review of the New York Post, which became an independent magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature, in 1924; he served as editor until 1936. He became editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club on its founding in 1926. Canby married Marion Ponsonby Gause, also of Wilmington, in 1907, and they had two sons. Cather’s acquaintance with the Canbys seems to predate 1922, when her cordial correspondence with the Canbys began. In the Literary Review she published "The House on Charles Street" (1922) and in the Saturday Review a letter to Wilbur Cross on Shadows on the Rock (1931) and an essay on Thomas Mann (1936).

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

"Conversation Piece," Saturday Review of Literature (December 14, 1940) by Henry Seidel Canby

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) by Willa Cather