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 |
You will remember that while you were in New York2 last summer I telephoned you that I was going into the Presbyterian Hospital3 for a few weeks. In reality I was going in to have the celebrated Doctor Whipple4 take out my gall bladder and appendix. The operation was a brilliant success (no drainage tubes or any of those horrid things) but the recovery was very slow and pretty awful. I weighed one hundred and twenty-six pounds when I went into the hospital and I came out weighing a little under one hundred and ten. For most of the month of August and all of September, I was lying in bed, in the apartment5, too ill to move, and the heat was outrageous. To make matters worse, it rained every day. I sweated pounds off, just as English jockeys do when they are in training. I kept on hating food and there was an undercurrent of nausea all the time, until about the first of December. Since then I have been pulling up rapidly. I now weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, have a good appetite and enjoy food. I rather hope I will gain a little more because I am not strong enough to go shopping and all the dresses that hang in my closets are preposterously too big for me!! Even my shoes are much too big. My hair all came out and I have frightful neuralgia in my head - unless it is tied up in woolen scarves at night.
I am relating these tiresome details because I am sure that you have known for some
time that something was the matter with me. You asked me once over the telephone if
you had offended me. Of ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ course, my dear Zoe, we have always had different
"ideologies" (horrid word!) and as people grow older their beliefs, like their
arteries, grow harder--we are less and less able to sympathetically comprehend the
other fellow's point of view. But something more than this, something physical which
I could not understand, was making me more and more short-tempered and irritable,
and unable to bear my own shortcomings and those of
my friends. Now that I am pigeon-livered, maybe I will have more patience with the
"new poetry" (manufactured by mathematicians and politicians) and with the
distorting processes with which the film makers attack the old masterpieces, drag
them out of their secluded niches, and use them for their horrid purposes. I [missing]
Here let me insist that when an intelligent man makes a good film (Noel Coward6, for example) I enjoy it as much as anybody. But these cheap hash-overs of really great literature (Anna Karenin7, Notre Dame de Paris8, Wuthering Heights9) etc) show the poverty of the minds behind the camera. Who would steal music if he could write music of his own? Novels of action can be dramatized. Novels of feeling, even if it is only feeling for a city or an historic period, cannot be.
Well, as Mrs. Arliss10 cabled "Happy New Year anyway!"
Affectionately WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1599.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1599
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf and handwritten on verso of second leaf. Bottom half of second leaf is missing.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Zoë Akins 1
- Date letter was written
- December 4, 1943
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Zoë Akins papers 1878-1959 (mssZA 1-7330), Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Individual Annotations
On 31 July 1942 at Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Allan Whipple surgically removed both Cather's appendix and gall bladder (see #2375).
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.
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’.
Whipple, Allen Oldfather (1881-1963). American surgeon. Dr. Whipple was the surgeon-in-chief at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital from 1921 to 1946. He is famous for inventing the pancreatoduodenectomy (the Whipple procedure), an innovative surgical procedure for treating patients with pancreatic cancer.
Coward, Noël Peirce (1899-1973). English playwright, actor, composer, and director. Born in suburban London to Arthur S. Coward and Violet Veitch Coward, Noël Coward began performing as a young boy, making his professional stage debut in 1911. A mentor introduced him into aristocratic society, the setting for many of his future plays, which began appearing in London in 1917, generally with increasing popularity. His first major success was with The Vortex (1924), followed by many plays, revues, and operettas, produced in both London and New York; he also starred in some of these. Some of Coward's plays, such as Private Lives, Design for Living, and Blithe Spirit, are still in the popular repertory. During World War II Coward also worked in films, receiving an honorary Academy Award for In Which We Serve (1942), a patriotic war film which he directed, for which he wrote the screenplay, and in which he starred. Cather may have been referring to this film in a 1943 letter (#1599). Coward became an expatriate after the war, but remained a presence in the British and American theatrical worlds. He was knighted in 1969.
Arliss, Florence Kate Montgomery (1871-1950) (“Flo”). British actress. Born in London, England, Florence Montgomery attended Miss Thorne’s Academy of Acting where she met her husband, George Arliss. Florence and George moved to America in 1901 after joining Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s prestigious acting troupe. Florence worked unofficially as the business partner and manager of George’s successful film career and appeared with him in the films Disraeli (1929) and The House of Rothschild (1934). Willa Cather corresponded with Florence and spent several evenings with the Arlisses in New York City.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy
Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) by Victor Hugo
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
