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 |
NORTHEAST HARBOR
MAINE September 6, 1944 My dear Louise1:
The candy wasn't bad at all and I was very glad to get it.
bBut it was abominably packed, and was pretty badly shaken up and broken up when
it arrived. Even in that state I much preferred it to a book by Dornford Yates4 which came from the Museum
and I think must have been sent by you. I have tried Dornford Yates
before, but his cold-blooded,
game of chess, sixty feet from a certain ditch and a half a mile from a
certain tree on a certain hill,
just doesn't interest me at all. He has his own method and has pretty well
perfected it, but it doesn't mean anything to me.
The really good and welcome remembrance was your letter which told me of your feeling splendidly fit and climbing mountains again. I am awfully grateful for word of a good place to stop in Vermont5. Woodstock6 used to be a delightful place, but it has grown rather too fashionable.
I am leaving here2 this week but I intend to make several stops on the way and will scarcely be back on Park Avenue7 before the first of October. I will call you up soon after I get back.
Affectionately, Willa CatherThe above sounds rather like looking the gift horse in the mouth and then
pulling his teeth. But, as Horace
Walpole8 said “"unless I
tell the truth in a letter I am even more uncivil than otherwise—for I
hate the person who makes me lie lie—or
write as if I did.” He surely knew!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2931.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2931
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. Includes one typewritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber Burroughs 1
- Date letter was written
- September 6, 1944
- Place letter was written
- Northeast Harbor, Maine, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
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.
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
Person Annotations
Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.
Mercer, Cecil William (1885-1960) ("Dornford Yates"). British fiction writer. Cecil Mercer studied law at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor, but he gave up the law after serving in World War I to focus exclusively on writing fiction. Writing as Donford Yates, he first focused on the English upper classes of the Edwardian era in short stories and novels, and while continuing this focus also wrote detective thriller novels set on Continental Europe with Richard Chandos as the hero and narrator. After the war Mercer lived first in the Pyrenees and moved to Rhodesia, serving in the Royal Rhodesian Regiment in World War II. He died in Rhodesia.
Walpole, Horace (1717-1797). English writer and politician. Born to a British Prime Minister and his wife, Horace Walpole was educated at Cambridge. After a grand tour of Europe, he was elected a Whig Member of Parliament from a borough in Cornwall in 1741, serving thirteen years. He was later elected from a district in Norfolk and from King’s Lynn. His anonymous novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) inaugurated the Gothic novel tradition in Britain, and his letters, first published in the mid nineteenth century, were widely read and often quoted.
Place Annotations
