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 |
Two weeks ago I reached this very satisfactory refuge2, after travelling up and down the Maine3 coast in an unsuccessful search for comfortable quarters. All the old pleasant places of five years ago are deserted. Bar Harbor4 is a ghost town. All the big houses of the rich are now inhabited by one caretaker. The good shops of former times are shut down—Main street a row of dirty windows.
Here Miss Lewis5 and I have a very comfortable cottage with a lovely garden. Absolute quiet. We take our meals at the Inn6 which is a short block away. We walk to it over green turf and fine trees and hedges keep it out of sight. The food is not very good, certainly, but better than I have found anywhere else except in Boston7.
Next week Miss Lewis goes up to Grand Manan8 to look after some repairs that are to be made on her cottage there, but I shall be here for the next fortnight at least. The weather is always cool here. One needs a wood fire every evening. We have a good deal of rain and heavy weather, but there is a good library, and after the horrors of Portland9 and it's war industries10 I am very willing to sit indoors by the fire and read forgotten books—or botanize a little. This place is not nearly so interesting as Grand Manan but it is much more comfortable (in the conventional way) and not so reduced in food supplies.
I hope you are out of New York11 and its preposterous "heat waves." 1943 JUL 2 AM 9:49
ASTICOU INN NORTHEAST HARBOR MAINEOn any day that you are not too busy I'd be glad to hear from you about anything you're interested in. I'm delighted that Ezra Pound12 is a "traitor"—though I can't believe him very genuine even in that role. It has been the Hell of a summer, hasn't it? In every way.
Languidly but faithfully Willa Cather. 1943 JUL 2 AM 9:49Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2723.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2723
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of first leaf and recto only of second leaf with date stamp on verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Alfred A. Knopf1
- Date letter was written
- July 29 [1943]
- Place letter was written
- Northeast Harbor, Maine, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Cather-Knopf Correspondence, The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
Asticou Inn (Northeast Harbor, ME): Originally built in 1883 by A. C. Savage, the Asticou Inn was destroyed by a fire in 1899, but rebuilt by 1901. When the war and health considerations made travel to Grand Manan impossible, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis stayed at the Asticou in the 1940s, occupying a small cottage on the grounds of the inn.
During World War II, Portland's shipyards were heavily developed to build cargo ships to support the war effort.
Person Annotations
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.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Pound, Ezra (1885-1972). American poet and critic. Born in
Hailey, ID, to Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston Pound, Ezra Pound earned
his PhB from Hamilton College and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania
and taught Romance languages for a year at Wabash Presbyterian College
before leaving for Europe in 1908, becoming an expatriate and a leading
figure in the Imagist and modernist movements. Pound both published his own
poetry and promoted modernist writers in publications like New Age, the Egoist, and Poetry. Pound wrote more than seventy books including, Personae (1909), Homage to Sextus
Propertius (1919), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
(1921), and The Cantos (1925-1962). He served as
foreign advisor and editor of the Chicago-based little magazine the Dial from 1920 to 1923 and was responsible for its
publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922.
Pound supported Benito Mussolini and made pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy
starting in 1935; in 1943 he was indicted in absentia
for treason. After Mussolini’s surrender in 1945, Pound was arrested,
declared insane, and confined until 1958. Cather was skeptical of both
Pound’s poetry and him personally.
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
