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 |
No, my dear Roscoe1, it was not business troubles that I meant to write you about when I asked where you would be in January. Sometimes I wish to speak to you "personally", as you do to me in your letter which just came.
Since I have lost Isabelle3 there is now no one
to whom I can show things to—no one who will take pleasures in pleasant recognition
that comes my w way. Of course Alfred Knopf4 is 2always
interested, but he takes the lofty stand that whatever I do is pretty good, and it's
no matter what people say. While to me it does matter what some people say. People
like Tweedsmuir5—because his book6 on Augustus
Caesar7 seems to me the best piece of historical writing that has come
along in years, and because he is a finished scholar.
The Swedish review8 is a fine piece9 of critical work because it tells
exa exactly 3why
the book10 was written as it was; the low
tone, the respectful distance which I tried to keep between the characters and
myself. And he11 is equally good on Lawrence12, whom I knew very well.
So if you are not too busy, I would like to send you such things from time to time. The Menuhins13 are like Alfred—they think high praise comes naturally to me, as to them. A few years ago Yehudi14 told a reporter that his favorite authors were Victor Hugo15 and Willa Cather!
4But you know it's a long road from Red Cloud16 to any sort of finish.
Look the enclosures over when you have liesure and a good cigar, and when you and Meta17 have read them, mail them back to me, registered post.
Lovingly WillieI am
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2141.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2141
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Roscoe Cather1
- Date letter was written
- [January 1939]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Internal evidence suggests that this letter was likely written in January of 1939. Cather references another letter that she wrote to Roscoe towards the end of December of 1938 in which she asks where he will be in January. This letter is addressing Roscoe's response to that previous letter.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Roscoe and Meta Cather Collection (MS316), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
Cather is probably referring to Anders Österling's joint review of D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent and Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. The original review, entitled "Ormen och Korset," was published on November 16, 1938, in Stockholms-Tidningen.
Person Annotations
Cather, Roscoe (1877-1945) (“Ross”). Cather’s brother.
Roscoe was born in Virginia, the second child and oldest son of
Charles and Virginia Cather. After graduating from Red Cloud (NE) High
School in 1895, he taught country school for two years, attended the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln for one year (1897-1898), taught high
school in Carlton, NE, and Oxford, NE, and finally became superintendent of
schools in Fullerton, NE. There he met fellow teacher Meta Schaper, whom he
married in 1907. They relocated to Lander, WY, in 1909, where he opened an
abstract office and where their three children, Virginia and twins Margaret
and Elizabeth, were born. In 1921, they moved to Casper, WY, where Roscoe
became president of the Wyoming Trust Company, and in 1937 to Colusa, CA,
where Roscoe and his brother Douglass had acquired a controlling interest in
the First Savings Bank of Colusa. Roscoe served as president of the bank
until his death. Willa visited Roscoe and his family in Wyoming several
times and shared important travel experiences with them, including a 1926
trip to New Mexico with Roscoe, Meta, and their children and a 1941 San
Francisco vacation with Roscoe and Meta. She also relied on him to handle
family-related business as well as personal financial matters, and he was
one of her chief correspondents throughout her life. Roscoe served as a
prototype for one of the twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime
friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially
prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress
Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to
reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to
live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of
Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung
accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved
to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh,
finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited
New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also
rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together
to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father,
Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist
Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in
1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the
Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather
and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and
1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S.
for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her
death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving
her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work,
through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After
Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to
Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few
letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Buchan, John, Baron Tweedsmuir (1875-1940). Scottish novelist and
politician. Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University,
Buchan pursued his writing career, at the same time as his political career
led to serving in South Africa, in Parliament, and in the British army in
World War I. In 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada and
elevated to the peerage; that same year Alfred Hitchcock made one of
Buchan’s most popular books, The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915), into a film. Buchan also wrote histories, biographies, and a 1940
memoir Memory Hold-the-Door (published as Pilgrim’s Way in the U.S.), which Cather read at the
suggestion of Ferris Greenslet, a friend of Buchan.
Augustus (63 B.C.-14 A.D.) ("Caesar Augustus"). Roman Emperor. Born Gaius Octavius Thurinus, he became the first Roman emperor following the destruction of the republic by his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar. After consolidating his power, Augustus transformed Rome from a republic to an empire and brought about the peace and prosperity that led to the Pax Romana. During his forty-year rule, he doubled the size of the empire.
Österling, Anders (1884-1981). Swedish poet, translator, and literary critic. Anders Österling published his first book of poetry, Preludier, in 1904. He went on to produce several more volumes of collected verse and also worked translating major works into Swedish. In 1919 he was elected as the youngest member of the Swedish Academy. Two years later, he joined the Academy’s Nobel Prize Committee, eventually becoming its longest-serving member. Having worked as literary editor for two other newspapers, in 1936 Österling was appointed literary editor of Stockholms-Tidnigen, in which he published a joint review of D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) in 1938.
Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930) (“D.H.”). British novelist.
Born in Nottingham, England, into a working-class family, Lawrence
left high school in 1901 to work as a clerk, although he soon secured a
position as a pupil teacher and earned his teacher’s certificate at the
University of Nottingham. His first novel, The White
Peacock (1911), was published by William Heinemann while he was
still a schoolteacher. After a bout with pneumonia ended his teaching
career, he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his
professors at Nottingham. Frieda left her husband and three young children
to travel to Germany with Lawrence. After they had settled in Italy,
Heinemann rejected Lawrence’s novel Paul Morel as
indecent. The publisher Duckworth encouraged him to revise it, and published
as Sons and Lovers (1913) it made his reputation. He
and Frieda returned to England and married in London in 1914. Lawrence
struggled to make a living: The Rainbow (1915) was
ruled obscene and withdrawn from circulation, and Women in
Love was repeatedly rejected by publishers before publication in
1920. After World War I he and Frieda returned to Italy, settling in Capri,
where in 1921 they met expatriate American painters Earl Brewster and Achsah
Barlow-Brewster, with whom they traveled to Ceylon in 1922. The Lawrences
eventually traveled to the U.S. by sea to the west coast and spent time in
New Mexico and Mexico before returning to Europe in early 1923. In July
1923, the Brewsters gave the Lawrences Cather and Edith Lewis’s address in
New York City, and D. H. and Frieda, accompanied by Dorothy Brett, visited 5
Bank Street. From New York City the Lawrences and Brett traveled to New
Mexico and settled on a small derelict ranch, which D.H. purchased from
Mabel Dodge Luhan, and where he wrote fiction set in the U.S. Southwest and
Mexico. During their July 1925 visit to Luhan’s compound in Taos, NM, Cather
and Lewis visited the Lawrences at their ranch. The Lawrences soon returned
to Europe, however, where D.H. died of tuberculosis. His literary reputation
and fame increased after his death. Cather’s attitude towards him was
ambivalent. She liked him personally, praised him as “unquestionably the
most gifted writer of his generation” (#1118), and praised memoirs of him by
Luhan and the Brewsters. However, in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), she
criticizes Lawrence for failing to distinguish between “emotion and mere
sensory reactions” and reducing his characters in The
Rainbow to “mere animal pulp.” “Can one imagine anything more
terrible,” she queries, “than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in
prose by Mr. Lawrence?”
Menuhin, Hephzibah (1920-1981). Pianist. Born in San
Francisco, CA, to Moshe and Marutha Sher Menuhin, immigrant Russian Jews by
way of Palestine, Hephzibah began studying piano at the age of four and gave
her first recital at age eight. The studies and career of her older brother,
violinist Yehudi, dominated the family (the youngest child, Yaltah, was also
a pianist). In 1930, the Menuhin family took up residence in Paris, where
Cather first met them in the home of Jan Hambourg and Isabelle McClung
Hambourg and became a family friend; the children called her “Aunt Willa.”
In the 1930s the Menuhin family made the Ansonia Hotel its home base during
their frequent stays in New York City. Cather took the Menuhin children on
walks around Central Park, read Shakespeare with them, and gave them books
as gifts. Hephzibah served as Yehudi’s accompanist; they made their first
recording together in 1933 and often performed together. The family
purchased a ranch in Los Gatos, CA, in 1935. In 1938, after a concert in
London, England, Hephzibah met Australian Lindsay Nicholas, whom she soon
married (Yehudi married Lindsay’s sister Nola). She abandoned her plans for
a solo debut at Carnegie Hall, moved with Nicholas to Australia, and had two
sons, Kronrod and Marston. She continued to perform occasionally in
Australia, including with Yehudi when he toured the country. Although Cather
mentions carrying on a correspondence with Hephzibah after her move to
Australia, these letters have not been located. Cather enjoyed a late life
visit from Hephzibah and Yehudi and their families in 1947. In 1955,
Hephzibah divorced Nicholas and married Richard Hauser. Together, they were
active in human rights advocacy, and Hephzibah continued to perform. She
died in London, England.
Menuhin, Yaltah (1921-2001). Pianist. Born in San Francisco,
CA, to Moshe and Marutha Sher Menuhin, immigrant Russian Jews by way of
Palestine, Yaltah began studying piano at the age of three. The studies and
career of her older brother, violinist Yehudi, dominated the family (their
second child, Hepzibah, was also a pianist). In 1930, the Menuhin family
took up residence in Paris, where Cather first met them in the home of Jan
Hambourg and Isabelle McClung Hambourg and became a family friend; the
children called her “Aunt Willa.” In the 1930s, the Menuhin family made the
Ansonia Hotel its home base during their frequent stays in New York City.
Cather took the Menuhin children on walks around Central Park, read
Shakespeare with them, and gave them books as gifts. The family purchased a
ranch in Los Gatos, CA, in 1935. As Yaltah grew older and wanted to pursue
her own musical career, her relationship with her mother grew
difficult—Marutha supported Hepzibah’s role as Yehudi’s accompanist
but believed a solo career inappropriate for a woman (even though many
recognized that Yaltah was the most gifted musician of the three children).
In June 1938, just shy of her seventeenth birthday and apparently under
duress from her mother, Yaltah married William Stix, a lawyer from St.
Louis, MO, who worked in Washington, DC; Cather attended the wedding. In
1939 Yaltah first separated from and then divorced Stix. In 1941, she eloped
with U.S. Army officer Benjamin Rolfe. Her parents publicly disavowed the
marriage and she and her mother stopped speaking to one another. The Rolfes
had two children, Robert and Lionel. None of Cather’s extant letters to
Yaltah mention the turmoil surrounding her marriage, divorce, and
remarriage, however. Yaltah’s final marriage to American pianist Joel Ryce
was long and happy, and during it she pursued a performing career. According
to her son Lionel Rolfe, she treasured her letters from Cather and often
reread them. She eventually gave them to him so he could sell them and use
the funds to support his aspiration to become a writer.
Menuhin, Yehudi (1916-1999). Violinist and conductor. Born in
New York City to Moshe Mnuchin and Marutha Sher Mnuchin, immigrant Russian
Jews by way of Palestine who changed the spelling of their surname and moved
the family to San Francisco in 1918, Yehudi started violin lessons at age
four and made his first public appearance in 1922. His two younger siblings,
Hepzibah and Yaltah, studied piano, although his parents prioritized the
musical career of their son over their daughters. With the support of patron
Sidney Ehrman, the Menuhin family followed Yehudi’s teacher Louis Persinger
to New York City. Ehrman also sponsored Yehudi for a year of study in Paris,
France, with Georges Enesco. Yehudi began attracting national attention in
1927 and recorded and toured the U.S. in 1929. That year at Carnegie Hall,
his performance of concertos by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms with Bruno
Walter and the Berlin Philharmonic inspired Albert Einstein to proclaim “now
I know there is a God in Heaven”; Cather was also in the audience for this
concert. In 1930, the Menuhin family took up residence in Paris, where
Cather first met them in the home of Jan Hambourg and Isabelle McClung
Hambourg and became a family friend; the children called her “Aunt Willa.”
In the 1930s, the Menuhin family made the Ansonia Hotel its home base during
their frequent stays in New York City. Cather took the Menuhin children on
walks around Central Park, read Shakespeare with them, and gave them books
as gifts. Yehudi’s sister Hepzibah accompanied her brother on piano; they
made their first recording together in 1933 and often performed together.
The family purchased a ranch in Los Gatos, CA, in 1935, and after a world
tour that year, Yehudi withdrew from performing for 18 months and stayed at
the ranch with his family. He returned to the concert stage in 1937 and met
and married Nola Nicholas in 1938 (Hepzibah married Nola’s brother Lindsay).
Yehudi and Nola had two children, Krov and Zamira. Cather enjoyed a late
life visit from Hepzibah and Yehudi and their families in 1947. Cather
corresponded regularly with the adult Yehudi, giving him personal advice,
although only one original letter has surfaced. In 1947, Yehudi and Nola
divorced and he married British ballerina Diana Gould, with whom he had two
more children. Living in Europe, he continued his career as a performer and
also became a conductor, established a school in England, and became a
British citizen. He died in Berlin, Germany, while on tour.
Hugo, Victor (1802-1885). French poet, author, and playwright.
Born in Besançon, France, Victor Hugo began his professional life as
a lawyer but ultimately became a writer and an important figure of French
Romanticism. He wrote poetry, novels and plays, and founded the literary
journal Conservatuer Litteraire. His most famous
works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Cather began reading French
literature as a teenager and especially enjoyed Hugo’s novels.
Cather, Meta Schaper (1884-1973). Cather’s sister-in-law.
Meta Schaper was born in Plattsmouth, NE, the second daughter of
Robert and Julia Ramke Schaper. After graduating from the University of
Nebraska in Lincoln 1903, Meta Schaper taught at Havelock High School in her
hometown of Havelock, NE (now part of Lincoln). She met Roscoe Cather when
teaching in Fullerton, NE, and they married in 1907. They moved to Lander,
WY, in 1909, where she gave birth to three daughters, Virginia and twins
Margaret and Elizabeth. The family moved to Casper, WY, in 1921 and Colusa,
CA, in 1937. Willa visited Meta and Roscoe’s family in Wyoming several times
and shared important travel experiences with them, including a 1926 trip to
New Mexico with Meta, Roscoe, and their children and a 1941 San Francisco
vacation with Roscoe and Meta. Meta and Willa remained friends until Willa’s
death.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Augustus (1937) by John (Lord Tweedsmuir) Buchan
"Ormen och Korset," Stockholms-Tidningen (November 16, 1938) by Anders Österling
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
