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 hate to reply to your kind and cordial letter by dictation. But I strained my right hand4 just after New
Year’s in a way that set up an inflamation of the sheath in the tendon of my right thumb, and I have been wearing my
hand and wrist in a light aluminum brace ever since. You may
can not realize the terrible importance of
a thumb in handling a pen.—until your thumb is immobilized!
I had never heard that you had to flee out of Italy5. I am afraid you will never again see the books you left there - no, nor the city in which you left them. I once heard Sir James Jeans6 say that, next to man’s longing for personal immorality was his wish that his world should go on just as he had known it. Surely we are singularly unfortunate, since we lose not only our dearest friends, but see the world we loved brutally smashed to pieces - absolutely wiped out.
I am very pleased at what you tell me - that some of my books have stood up under a re-reading many years after. I am always glad to hear a good word for “The Professor’s House”7, which has been, I suspect, the least popular of the books you mention. To most people, I think it is just “another story”. But to me it was an interesting experiment. I really got the idea from8 a Dutch painting: a rich warm interior - - and through an open window the sea, blue, very much alive, with a light wind on the water. I tried to use the Blue Mesa in that particular way, but most people seem to think it was a very faulty kind of structure.
Yes, indeed, I do remember the day you came up Murray Hill9 because you had read “Paul’s
Case”10. What a happy group of friends used to meet there in those days!
And how few of them are left. And how little of the world they
⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ loved is left. If only we had all been born in the year eighteen fifty, we would
have had all the best things of four civilizations, and none of the horrors. Would
never have known of, or dreamed of the horrors.
Please give my greetings and good wishes to Mrs. Wharton11 and Mrs. Holdship12.
Mrs. Elizabeth Moorhead Vermoroken1 Schenley Farms Pittsburgh3 Pennsylvania NEW YORK, N.Y.2 MAY 6 1944 130 PM Willa Cather—Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1666.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1666
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only. Includes one typewritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Moorhead Vermorcken1
- Date letter was written
- May 5, 1944
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1342 (10)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
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. Dr. Frank Ober built a brace specifically for her hand in 1941.
Cather provided a fuller, but consistent, explanation of the novel's form in a letter to Pat Knopf, part of which is known through its publication in the October 1940 News Letter of the College English Association. The paragraphs were later reprinted as "On The Professor's House" in the posthumous volume, Willa Cather on Writing (1949).
1180 Murray Hill Avenue (Pittsburgh, PA): Located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, now part of the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, 1180 Murray Hill was the home of Judge Samuel A. McClung and his family. Cather lived there at Isabelle McClung’s invitation from 1901 to 1906. She returned there to visit multiple times until 1915, often writing during these visits.
Person Annotations
Vermorcken, Elizabeth Moorhead (c.1866-1955). American writer and academic. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Elizabeth Moorhead married Frederick Vermorcken in 1891, although the marriage did not last long, and she soon returned to Pittsburgh. In 1910 she began an eighteen-year teaching career as an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh while also writing short stories and articles that appeared in national magazines. After retiring from teaching in 1928, she wrote three novels. After moving to Florence, Italy, in the 1930s, she began writing The Whirling Spindle (1942), about her family and friends in Pittsburgh, where she returned after Italy’s entry into WWII. Vermorcken likely met Cather in Pittsburgh in 1905, and they remained friends after Cather moved to New York City. Vermorcken wrote the first biographical account of Cather’s Pittsburgh years, These Too Were Here: Louise Homer and Willa Cather (1950).
Jeans, James Hopwood (1877-1946). British physicist, mathematician, and astronomer. Sir James Jeans is best known for proposing that matter is continuously created throughout the universe. He taught at both the University of Cambridge and Princeton University until he was appointed a research associate at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Throughout his career he wrote many popular expositions of science of which Cather was an interested reader. She checked The Universe Around Us (1929) out of the New York Society Library and gave Yehudi Menuhin Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe (1930) for his fifteenth birthday. She evidently heard him lecture, quoting from his lecture in several letters, and they may have corresponded.
Wharton, Fanny Electa Bakewell (1863- 1954). Willa Cather's Pittsburgh acquaintance. Born in Pennsylvania, Fanny Bakewell was the daughter of lawyer William Bakewell and his wife Jane Campbell Bakewell. She married tile manufacturer Charles B. Wharton in 1887, and they had one son, William B. Wharton, born in 1888. The Whartons lived with Fanny Wharton’s parents in 1900, next door to her sister, Jane Holdship, on Murray Hill Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, near the McClung home at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue, where Willa Cather lived. After Fanny Wharton was widowed in 1917, she and her son lived with the Holdships for a time. She travelled extensively with her sister Jane B. Holdship in the 1920s and 1930s. Cather visited the Whartons and the Holdships on a trip to Pittsburg in 1908.
Holdship, Jane Campbell Bakewell (1867-1956). Willa Cather's Pittsburgh acquaintance. Born in Pennsylvania, Jane Bakewell was the daughter of lawyer William Bakewell and his wife Jane Campbell Bakewell. She married businessman George Irwin Holdship, of a well-known Pittsburgh family, in 1889. They lived at 1155 Murray Hill Avenue in Pittsburgh, PA, for many years, near the McClung home at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue, where Willa Cather lived. The Holdships were also friends of Elizabeth Moorhead Vermorcken; George Holdship served as an usher at her wedding. Jane Holdship, widowed in 1928, travelled extensively with her sister Fanny Wharton in the 1920s and 1930s. Cather visited the Whartons and the Holdships on a trip to Pittsburgh in 1908.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Professor's House (1925) by Willa Cather
"Paul's Case," The Troll Garden (1905) by Willa Cather
