Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 August 17, 1946 My dear Helen Louise1,
Miss Lewis4 was awfully ill for ten days after we got here2, had to have all her meals in bed. She was terribly discouraged and so was I but at last she has rallied and once on her feet seems to get on very fast. This morning she has gone into the village to have her hair washed and do a little shopping.
It was very hard for me to come away from New
York5 without seeing you again, my dear. Various illnesses and
complications at my apartment6 have
given me so little time to see you while you have been settled7 in New
Jersey8. But I think you must know what pleasure it gave me to be
with you when I could see you, and how
much a reunion with you and your brother9
meant to me. I was very very fond of both of you when you were little children.
Sometimes the little children we love turn out to be very different creatures as
they grow older; but with you and Charles
that was, happily for me, not the case. After I said good-bye to you as little
children I did not see you again until you were grown into the kind of people you
were destined to be in this world, -- and every trait that I had loved in both of
you had remained the same. Growing up had given to each of you wider interests and
even more personal charm than you had when you were little. I felt such pleasure and
satisfaction in being with you both; in watching the better family traits come out
in each of you, and with those the
individual things which come from no family and which are one’s very own and derived
from nobody. And I still take the
same pleasure in being with either ofyou that I felt when you were children, and, in addition to that, a comradeship which will mean a great
loss to me when you go away.
bBut I am not going to let you escape me altogether. If you cannot come
back to New York occasionally, I shall manage to escape to the
ASTICOU INN
NORTHEAST HARBOR
MAINE
Schenley Hotel10 occasionally, though I should have to adopt an assumed name11 on the hotel register. I
know too many there12 to go under my own name
but all the people I really care about are either dead or have gone abroad to live.
The undesirables are always there, you know!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let3109.xml
- Letter identifier
- 3109
- Contents
- Document is photocopy of two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Helen Louise Cather Southwick 1
- Date letter was written
- August 17, 1946
- Place letter was written
- Northeast Harbor, Maine, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Charles E. Cather Collection (MS350), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
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.
Helen and Philip Southwick lived in New Jersey from 1943 to 1946.
The Schenley Hotel (renamed the Schenley Park Hotel in 1923), a large fine hotel in the center of Pittsburgh, is mentioned in Cather's stories "Paul's Case" (1905) and "A Gold Slipper" (1917).
This was apparently Cather's practice after she became famous; sometimes Edith Lewis registered herself and Cather under her own name. At other times Cather would ask the desk clerk to conceal the page of the hotel register which had her name until she had gone.
Person Annotations
Southwick, Helen Louise Cather (1918-2004). Cather’s niece.
Helen was born in Red Cloud, NE, to Willa Cather’s brother James and
his wife Ethel. Willa was a doting aunt on her visits to Red Cloud. In 1931,
Helen moved with her family to Long Beach, CA, where she graduated high
school and attended Long Beach City College. In 1939, Helen returned to Red
Cloud to help care for her maternal grandmother and then enrolled in the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where she met her future husband, Philip
Southwick. After graduating in 1941, she briefly returned to California to
work in the personnel department of Douglas Aircraft company, but married
Southwick in Lincoln in 1942, and then moved with him to Champaign, IL. When
Philip’s employment took them to Plainfield, NJ, she frequently spent time
with her aunt in New York City. In 1946, the Southwicks moved to Pittsburgh,
PA, where their son James was born. In later years Helen worked as a school
librarian and was active in the Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, NE. She was
a beneficiary of Cather’s literary estate, and when Edith Lewis died in 1972
she bequeathed Cather books and manuscripts to Helen and her brother Charles
Cather. Helen donated her share of these materials and Willa Cather’s
letters to her to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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.
Cather, Charles Edwin (1923-2011). Cather’s nephew. Charles’s parents were James D. and Ethel Garber Cather, and he was likely born in Red Cloud, NE, where he spent the early years of his childhood. He was, as Willa Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “the little nephew I love the best” who inspired her portrayal of the little boy Jacques in Shadows on the Rock (1931) (#1054). He moved with his family to California in the 1930s. Cather continued to be an indulgent aunt as he got older, writing him letters of advice about and lending him money for his education. He attended, but did not complete degrees from, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY, and the Law School at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After his aunt’s death he completed undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, CA. He was a beneficiary of his aunt’s estate and was appointed her literary executor after Edith Lewis’s death.
Place Annotations
