Julian Lawrence Maline (March 3, 1947)

#1753: Willa Cather to Julian Lawrence Maline, March 3, 1947

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ March 3, 1947. Dear Father Maline¹:

It gives me great pleasure to permit you to quote the few lines³ about Father Noel Chabanel⁴. I, also, felt a very special interest in him - he came nearer to my sympathies, I think, than any other of his fellow martyrs. One cannot explain a special interest toward a single one in a group of heroic men who made the supreme sacrifice. But if one feels this interest, one must express it. Indeed, that spontaneous feeling of kinship with a place or person is the most pleasurable part of a writer's work.

Thanking you for your kind and friendly letter, I am

Faithfully yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1753.xml
Letter identifier: 1753
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Julian Lawrence Maline ¹
Date letter was written: March 3, 1947
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949 (MSS 6494), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA

Person Annotations

1777

Maline, Julian Lawrence (1897-after 1970). American Jesuit priest, educator, and anthologist. Born in Youngstown, OH, Julian Maline was educated in Roman Catholic schools, including St. Stanislaus Seminary in Missouri, and Gonzaga University in Washington, then did graduate work at the Ohio State University in the early 1930s. After being ordained a priest in the Jesuit order he taught in Catholic schools in Ohio and Indiana. By 1940 he was superintendent of Jesuit universities and colleges for the Chicago province and later for the Detroit province. With various co-editors he compiled many anthologies of English and American literature in the St. Thomas More series. In 1947 Cather gave Maline permission to quote a passage from Shadows on the Rock (1931) about the martyr Fr. Noel Chabanel.

1778

Chabanel, Noel (1613-1649). French-Canadian martyr and saint. Born in the Haute-Loire region of France, Chabanel entered the Jesuit novitiate at Toulouse in 1630. He became a professor of rhetoric before being sent to New France in 1643 as a missionary. He had difficulties learning the Native language and a distaste for Native ways. During an uprising he was travelling to a place of relative safety when he was separated from his guides and, apparently, captured by a Huron, who killed him on December 8, 1549, becoming one of the eight North American Martyrs of the Catholic Church. He was canonized in 1930. His story is told in Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931).

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

Shadows on the Rock (1931) by Willa Cather