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 am sorry, on my return from the North, to find here a letter from you which is already two months old. For the last four months I have been pretty well cut off from the world on a small island3 out in the Atlantic4, reached only occasionally by boat from the coast of Maine5. For the last year New York City2 has been so at the mercy of Committees and Bureaus, Organizations to Improve Foreign Relations, etc., etc., that one really had to get away from it, as far as possible, in order to possess one’s soul at all. The splendid old roads that I used to travel back and forth across the continent were practically closed to civilians, so I had to seek a little quiet out in the Atlantic. I had no mail at all forwarded to me, as the most obtrusive and unreasonable and pompous requests come through the post.
You ask about your old friend, and mine, S. S. McClure6. He lives at the Union League Club, New York City. I had tea with him there in June, the day before I left for my island. He is rather frail, but I have seldom seen anyone grow old so beautifully. He has really become very handsome,- and so gentle and dignified! You may remember that his face was always a singular, sympathetic one, with many shades of feeling. Occasionally his enthusiasms used to burst through it like a volcanic eruption. That volcanic activity is no longer there. As I sat and talked to him that afternoon four months ago, I thought I had almost never heard a voice that had so many shades of compassion and kindliness; a kind of forgiveness for all the wrong things in the world. Whatever faults Mr. McClure had came from his enthusiasms and nervous excitability. Now he is as calm as a harvest moon - when it shines over the wheat fields after reaping is over.
I hope that sometime after this war is over
(if it ever is!) to be able to
I may go back to London7, and that I may have the pleasure of
meeting you. For a long while before this war broke out, my stays abroad were always
in France8 and in Italy9, because in both places I had old and dear
American friends. When we meet, I shall
have a considerable personal background behind you. I read with great delight your
volume of reminiscences10 - surely, so French a
French childhood and so English an English childhood must result in double
personality!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1674.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1674
- Contents
- Document is leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Marie Belloc Lowndes1
- Date letter was written
- October 4, 1944
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- M.A.B. Lowndes, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX
Individual Annotations
Willa Cather and Edith Lewis spent the summer of 1944 at the Asticou Inn at Northeast Harbor, Maine. They last stayed at their cottage on Grand Manan Island in 1940.
Person Annotations
Lowndes, Marie Adelaide Belloc (1868-1947). British writer.
Marie Belloc was born in London, England, the daughter of a French
barrister and an English suffragist; her brother was humorist Hilaire
Belloc. Marie spent her childhood in France, experiences recounted in her
first autobiography, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia
(1941). She married Frederick Lowndes in 1896 and published her first book,
a royal biography, in 1898. A prolific writer of suspense fiction, an early
version of her most famous book, The Lodger (1913)
(based on the case of Jack the Ripper), appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911. Other stories by Lowndes appeared in
McClure’s while Cather was editor there, but it
is not clear whether they ever met in person.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia: A Record of Love and of Childhood (1941), by Marie Belloc Lowndes
