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 |
History repeats itself, and I followed your example. Your letter reached me when I
was in the hospital being treated for an ulcerated sore tooth
throatand a mysterious high temperature6 that came from God
knows where - nobody else seems to know. I still see Dr.
Frank Ober7 from time to time, although my right hand8 is just as good as it ever was and my friends
all say that my handwriting is much improved. I will make almost any excuse to see
Dr. Ober, because he always gives me a brace.
I wonder whether you got down to hear Jack9 sing at St. Paul’s Chapel10 on March 15th. I was still in the hospital then and Miss Lewis11 was visiting some Czech friends12 of hers in the country.
It did astonish me to hear that Jack is taking a course in Columbia Law School. But on second thought it occurred to me that our Bench and Bar would be a good deal more lively, and quick to see a point that changed the whole trend of evidence, if there were more people in it with the flashes of intuition which Jack used to have when he was a young lad.
Aren’t you yourself living up to a pretty stiff schedule these days? Just the outside pressure of affairs all over the world is so heavy and so constant that I have let up on my personal schedule a good deal. It seems to me that the life of those who merely stand and wait - and dread the morning paper - is hard enough.
My love to both you and Mr. Whicher13, Willa CatherUndset14 told me she met you at Mount Holyoke15. Her “Return to the Future”16 has done very well, I’m glad
to say. I think it’s broadminded of our
countrymen to read it without prejudice, at this time when we are all out for
Russia17 and all cursing Japan18. Of course the book was written more
than a year before Pearl Harbor19.
But I doubt that subsequent events would have influenced her. She hated the
Russians because they were so horribly dirty, and she sh was charmed by the Japanese because they were very clean and had a
sort of personal elegance. Do read “Gunner’s
Daughter”20. To me it is her best book, though very few people seem to
know anything about it.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1578.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1578
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten and handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one typewritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Harriet Fox Whicher1
- Date letter was written
- April 22, 1942
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 2419 (25)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
Cather had a gall bladder infection (see #2192).
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.
The Columbia Chapel Chorus and Orchestra performed at Columbia University's St. Paul's Chapel on 15 March 1942.
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, precipitating the entry of the United States into World War II.
Person Annotations
Whicher, Harriet Fox (1890-1966). Mount Holyoke College English
Professor. Harriet Fox earned a BA from Barnard College at
Columbia University in New York City in 1910 and an MA from Columbia in
1911. She was an instructor in the Barnard College and Smith College English
Departments before she began a long career teaching English at Mount Holyoke
College in South Hadley, MA, from 1918 to 1944. Her long friendship with
Cather began in 1922 when she and her husband, George Frisbie Whicher, met
Cather at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer program of Middlebury
College in Vermont. Cather enjoyed the company of their two sons, John Fox
Whicher and Stephen Emerson Whicher, and she corresponded with Harriet and
George until late in life. After Harriet Whicher’s retirement from teaching
she worked as a freelance copy editor at McGraw Hill and edited a collection
of her deceased husband’s essays and speeches.
Bloom, Sarah J. (1889-1961). Cather's personal secretary. Born in New York in 1889 to Russian immigrants Solomon and Bertha Bloom, Sarah J. Bloom worked for Cather from some time in the 1920s until Cather's death and continued to work for Edith Lewis on matters pertaining to Cather's literary estate thereafter. Bloom typed Cather's literary manuscripts and managed Cather's correspondence, typing dictated letters and sometimes responding for Cather when she was traveling. Bloom’s work for Cather supplemented full-time office employment in New York City (for many years she worked for the New York State Public Service Commission). She thus came to Cather and Lewis's apartment on weekends to take dictation, pick up and deliver typescripts, and deliver typed letters for signature. She died in New York city in 1961.
Ober, Frank (1881-1960). Boston Orthopedic surgeon. Born in Mt. Desert, ME, Ober graduated from Tufts Medical School in Boston, MA, in 1905. He volunteered for service overseas in 1917 and spent two years as head of the orthopedic section of the U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 5 in France. On his return he rose from junior member of the visiting staff to chief orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Boston and served as a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School. About once a month he traveled to Philadelphia, PA, and New York City to see patients in consultation. In 1941, Cather was referred to Ober for her troubles with her right hand, and he prescribed and had constructed for her a metal and leather splint for her forearm and hand.
Whicher, John Fox (1919-1972) (“Jack”). American attorney. Born in New York City, younger son of George and Harriet Fox Whicher, John Whicher grew up in Amherst, MA, where his father taught at Amherst College. After graduating from college, John became an actor briefly before enlisting in the U.S. Army in April 1942; he rose to the rank of captain. After the war he became an attorney. Later he and his wife, Susan Whicher, settled in Dallas, TX, where he died. Cather knew John Whicher through her friendship with his parents.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Ruzicka, Filomena Sprova (c. 1883-c. 1961). Wife of Rudolph Ruzicka.
Filomena Sprova married Rudolph Ruzicka in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
in 1914 and moved with him to the New York City area, where they had two
children, Tatiana and Veronica. Cather was acquainted with Filomena through
her husband.
Ruzicka, Rudolph (1883-1978) (“Rudolf”). Czech-American wood
engraver, illustrator, painter, and type designer. Born in
Kourim, Bohemia, Rudolf (later also spelled Rudolph) Ruzicka moved with his
family to Chicago, IL, in 1894, where he took drawing lessons at the Hull
House School, apprenticed as a wood engraver, and studied at the Art
Institute of Chicago. In 1903 he moved to New York City and worked engraving
bank notes while taking classes at the Art Students’ League and the New York
School of Art. Cather likely first met Ruzicka around 1910, when his
classmate painter Earl Brewster married Edith Lewis’s college classmate
Achsah Barlow. Ruzicka married Filomena Sprova in Prague, Czhecoslovakia, in
1914, and they had two daughters, Tatiana and Veronica. He is best known for
his collaborations on fine press editions and for his type design,
including, beginning in 1935, linotype fonts. He produced designs for the
dust jackets of Obscure Destinies (1932), Lucy Gayheart (1935), and Sapphira
and the Slave Girl (1940), and Cather and Lewis sent out Christmas
cards featuring his designs in 1915, 1916, and 1935. Ruzicka attended
Cather’s funeral and helped Edith Lewis design Cather’s tombstone. Ruzicka
lived in various locations in Westchester County, NY, until his wife died c.
1961 and he moved to Norwich, VT, to live with his daughter, Veronica Laing.
He died in Hanover, NH.
Whicher, George Frisbie (1889-1954). Amherst College English
professor. After receiving a PhD from Columbia University in
1913, Whicher taught at Amherst College, his alma mater, from 1915 to 1954.
The most notable of his many books and translations was a critical biography
of Emily Dickinson, This Was a Poet (1938). Whicher
sometimes taught at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer program of
Middlebury College in Vermont. He and his wife, Harriet Fox Whicher, met
Cather there in 1922 when she came to give four lectures about writing.
Cather enjoyed the company of their two sons, John Fox Whicher and Stephen
Emerson Whicher, and she corresponded with Harriet and George until late in
life.
Undset, Sigrid (1882-1949). Norwegian novelist. Undset is
best known for her historical novels set in medieval Norway, the Kristin Lavrandsdatter trilogy (1920-22), set in the
fourteenth-century, The Master of Hestvikin tetralogy
(1925-27), set in the thirteenth century. Early in her career she wrote
realistic novels set in contemporary Norway, including Jenny (1911) about a woman painter. She was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1928 and continued to publish novels, set both in
contemporary and historical Norway, that reflected her conversion to
Catholicism. Undset persuaded her Norwegian publisher to issue her sister
Signe Undset Thomas’s translation of Lucy Gayheart
(1935) (the only Norwegian translation of Cather’s work to appear before her
death). A strong critic of the German Reich, Undset made a dramatic escape
from Norway over the arduous land route when the Nazis invaded Norway in
April 1940, events she later described in Return to the
Future (1942). When Undset reached New York City in the fall of
1940, Alfred Knopf, Cather and Undset’s mutual publisher, arranged their
first meeting. They had long been enthusiastic readers of each other’s
novels and were evidently established correspondents, although their extant
correspondence begins in 1940. During her exile Undset settled in a
residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and she and Cather saw each other
socially. Cather praised her as “just all a great woman should be - and on a
giant scale” (#1541). Undset was an active public critic of the Nazis during
her exile. She returned to Norway at the close of the war in 1945 and died
there.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Return to the Future (1942) by Sigrid Undset
Gunnar's Daughter (1936) by Sigrid Undset
