A dull, unmoving love affairAlexander’s Bridge, published in 1912, is the debut novel by Willa Cather. Bartley Alexander is an engineer who, as one might guess, designs bridges. He lives with his wife Winifred in Boston, but his career often involves work in other parts of the world. He is currently working on a major bridge project in Canada, of which much mention is made, but for some reason his job requires spending months at a time in London, without his wife. One one of his trips to England, Alexander hears that a former love from his youth, Hilda Burgoyne, is appearing as an actress in a popular play. The two old flames reconnect and commence having an affair. The rest of the book is basically Alexander feeling bad about the affair as it continues over months and perhaps even years, unbeknownst to his wife.
Cather may be one of America’s great novelists, but Alexander’s Bridge is not one of America’s great novels. A year later Cather would publish O Pioneers! and establish herself as one of the Midwest’s and Southwest’s great regional realists. Alexander’s Bridge, an urban romance set in Boston and London, is not typical of Cather’s work and, although it’s not a terrible piece of writing, doesn’t measure up to her later, greater works.
After reading more renowned works of Cather’s fiction like O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and One of Ours, one comes to expect realism, honesty, and psychological authenticity in her work. Alexander’s Bridge feels more like a string of soap opera scenes than a realistic look at a love affair. Unlike the realistic down-to-earth characters that one comes to know and care for in Cather’s regionalist novels, he characters in this love triangle are unrealistic ideals of beauty and perfection. Alexander and his two loves are pretentious people engaged in pretentious dialogue that reads more like Literature than actual conversation. The Alexanders live a life of luxury. Mrs. Alexander and Hilda Burgoyne are described as if they were the two most beautiful women of all-time. Is one supposed to sympathize with Alexander’s misgivings as he shuttles back and forth between sleeping with the two? Or is one supposed to envy him? The end result was neither, as I really didn’t care about any of these characters.
The final chapter is the best-written part of the whole book, perhaps because it deals with something other than the love affair and Alexander’s halfhearted crisis of conscience. Nevertheless, it is a predictable ending that one can see coming from chapter one. The whole book feels as formulaic and one-dimensional as so many Victorian romances, except that it deals with adultery in an open and frank way. That’s really the only sense in which the novel could be seen as modern or daring, and it’s not enough to keep the story interesting.
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From Nebraska farm to French battlefield
Willa Cather’s novel One of Ours was published in 1922 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Though not quite a masterpiece like My Ántonia or O Pioneers!, One of Ours is yet another strong work of literature from this master of Great Plains regionalism. As in those earlier works, Cather provides a naturalistic depiction of Nebraska farm life, but in this novel the scope broadens from its rural setting to the larger world stage with the outbreak of the First World War.
Claude Wheeler lives on his parents’ farm in Frankfort County, Nebraska. More thoughtful and sensitive than the average farm kid (as one would imagine Cather herself must have been), Claude chafes at the role in which the circumstances of his birth have placed him. He attends a local Christian college, but longs to go to the state university, both to satisfy his intellectual curiosity and to enjoy a more cosmopolitan social scene than his rural community affords. He wants the freedom to be his own person and live a life of his choosing, but family demands require him to quit school and manage the farm.
Trying to make the best of his situation, he enters into a misguided marriage. Cather telegraphs the inappropriateness of this match to such a degree that the reader wonders why Claude would go through with it, but within his insular community it seems his options for finding a life partner are limited. For a work written by a female author, it is surprising how unsympathetically the wife character is depicted. Cather’s take on this marital union is really quite one-sided, amounting to a trap for Claude that smothers any hopes and dreams he may have harbored. When America enters World War I, Claude enlists in the Army. For him, the war is a liberating experience, as it finally frees him from the stifling role that he’s lived his whole life.
Cather’s war narrative is rather meandering, focusing more on the mundane side of military life than on combat, and Claude is far more contemplative than the average doughboy. Music is a common theme in Cather’s fiction (see The Song of the Lark), and she couldn’t resist making one of the soldiers a classical violinist. There are hints of a nonphysical homosexual relationship between this character and Claude. Nevertheless, the book is neither as dull nor as wistful as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, and probably more true to the life of a typical soldier than Ernest Hemingway’s idiosyncratic A Farewell to Arms. The tone of One of Ours strikes a fine balance between disgust for war and reverence for military service. It has been criticized for not being anti-war enough, for making the Great War seem too glamorized or romantic, but the perspective from which Cather approaches the war, as viewed through Claude’s eyes, is truthful to the psychology of the character. She admirably captures the mixture of bravery, fear, shell shock, and awakening sense of purpose that might have fought it out in the mind of a Midwestern farm boy who finds himself at war in France.
One of Ours reads like two separate books connected by only a single thread: Claude. Not surprisingly for Cather, the first half set in Nebraska is really very good. Claude’s military career in Europe, however, is hit or miss. The book often defies expectations, but the ending feels like a foregone conclusion. Altogether, however, the pros outweigh the cons. I prefer One of Ours over both Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms. Even though it does have its share of faults, it may be the best American novel of World War I that I’ve read thus far.
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The power of the prairie
Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia was originally published in 1918. It is the final novel in her Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Since the three books don’t share any common characters or setting, the designation of trilogy is questionable, so don’t feel like you have to read either of those preceding volumes in order to enjoy this book.
My Ántonia is set in and around the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska. The story is narrated by Jim Burden, an attorney, who recalls memories of his boyhood, in particular his friendship with a girl named Ántonia Shimerda. Jim loses his parents at the age of ten, and moves from Virginia to Nebraska to live on his grandparents’ farm. On the train out West he encounters the Shimerda family, just arrived from Bohemia, who turn out to be his new neighbors. The Shimerdas are a proud and hardworking family, but they don’t take readily to farming the prairie, and they eke out a poor existence form their land. The Burdens befriend the Bohemian family and offer them as much help as they can, but the two families don’t always see eye to eye.
Jim and his grandparents eventually move into the town of Black Hawk. Ántonia is not far behind, for like many immigrant farm girls, she takes a job in town as a household servant and once again becomes Jim’s neighbor. Because the immigrant families don’t speak the language as well as the native-born residents of Black Hawk, they are treated as second-class citizens. No “American” boy would ever consider marrying one of these Norwegian or Bohemian hired girls, yet that doesn’t lessen their attraction. Having been raised in the country, Ántonia and her foreign friends are more free-spirited than their city-bred counterparts, with no inhibitions about socializing or dancing with men. Thus these girls are branded as bad girls by the gossips of the town, whether they deserve such a reputation or not.
In plain-spoken but poetic prose, Cather brilliantly depicts both the pleasures and pains of growing up in small-town middle America. Jim’s recollection of youth includes many nostalgic joys, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. When Cather shows the negative aspects of Black Hawk—its insularity, its conventionality, its narrow-mindedness—she does so in a matter-of-fact way that’s free of condescension or cynicism. The relationship between Jim and Ántonia is fascinating to watch as it progresses, but the supporting cast is equally well-drawn and engaging. Even when Cather goes off on a tangent to examine some of these minor characters, the result is fascinating. The story of Peter and Pavel is a tour de force, and ought to be excerpted and inserted into every high school literature textbook. The book’s final act is a little weak and unimpressive compared to all that came before, yet overall My Ántonia is a masterpiece of American naturalist literature. Cather finds real epic drama in the everyday lives of ordinary people as they try to make a life for themselves in this isolated hamlet on the Great Plains. If you grew up in a small town or rural area, My Ántonia will make you consider your own life and times, and how the people and places you knew in your childhood shaped the person you are today.
My Ántonia is generally considered Cather’s greatest work, though I think it’s a toss-up between this and O Pioneers! The first and third books in the Prairie Trilogy are both excellent, while the middle volume, The Song of the Lark, is clearly the weak link in the chain and a poor fit with the other two in terms of style and subject matter. For any fan of classic literature looking for that Great American Novel, My Ántonia is a must-read.
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Monotonous melody
The Song of the Lark, originally published in 1915, is the second novel in Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, coming after O Pioneers! and before My Ántonia. This book bears little resemblance to those other two novels, begging the question whether the trilogy is really a trilogy at all. The story does not take place on the prairie, but mostly in the deserts of Colorado and Arizona. Later it moves on to urban locales and becomes the sort of big-city drama that Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser might have written. I absolutely loved O Pioneers!, which makes it all the more disappointing to report that I found The Song of the Lark rather dull and lifeless.
When we first meet Thea Kronborg, she is 11 years old. The daughter of a Methodist minister, she resides in the small town of Moonstone, Colorado. The general consensus among the townsfolk is that Thea is brighter and more intelligent than her local peers and is destined for great things. She is a talented pianist and practices diligently to perfect her craft. In her later teen years she begins taking on students of her own. The book follows the progression of her musical career and her struggle to become not just a professional musician but a true artist.
Cather is known for her depictions of rural and small-town life. As a setting, Moonstone is certainly not without its charms, but compared to the locales of other Cather novels it’s neither as realistic nor as inviting. She seems hell-bent on populating her Colorado town with a host of real “characters,” and she devotes way too much effort to delineating all their peculiar personal quirks. Too her credit, however, the depiction of small-town life in this book is at times refreshingly less than positive. For the purpose of the story, Moonstone is to some extent a prison from which the heroine must escape. One interesting touch is that 12-year-old Thea has a 30-year-old boyfriend who’s just waiting for her to come of age so he can take her as his bride.
O Pioneers! was written in beautifully understated prose. In very few words Cather expressed some truly profound insights into human nature. The Song of the Lark, on the other hand, is needlessly and tediously verbose, belaboring every point it makes. In O Pioneers!, Cather did so much with so little. Here she does so little with so much. After sitting through the umpteenth music lesson or yet another interminable dinner conversation, the reader begins to feel like he’s reading the same chapters over and over again. Early in the story Cather goes to great lengths setting up Thea to be the ultimate independent woman, so when a man finally enters her life it ends up being a major disappointment. It’s difficult to see what exactly she sees in the guy, because every time he shows up in the narrative he’s a harbinger of boredom. The stiff, unrealistic dialog prevents the reader from identifying or sympathizing with the main characters, as does the fact that they all seem to carry on this strange, sexless existence for decades. Early in the story I really cared about Thea and rooted for her to achieve the success she deserves, but by the end of the book I couldn’t care less about her. The epilogue is one of the book’s more moving passages, primarily because Thea is largely absent from it.
Cather is a great writer, but this is not a great book. If it didn’t have her name on the title page it would be virtually indistinguishable from a host of other mediocre melodramas published during this era.
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The power of the prairie
O Pioneers! was originally published in 1913. It is the first novel in Willa Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy,” which also includes The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia. The three novels share no common characters or specific setting, but all deal with the lives of farmers on the American Great Plains.
O Pioneers! is set near the town of Hanover in a region of Nebraska known as the Divide. The story begins in the 1880s (“thirty years ago”). The Bergsons are a family of Swedish immigrants who have come to the region to farm this land, but like many of their neighbors they have found the soil an inhospitable host. When the father dies, he designates his daughter Alexandra to run the farm after his passing, as he judges her more capable for the task than her brothers. Given the family’s lack of agricultural success, Alexandra is faced with a tough choice: stay and work this hard land in hopes that the family’s efforts will pay off, or sell out and move on to greener pastures.
Upon reading the opening section of the book, I was worried that it might be a young adult novel along the lines of Little Women. As the story begins, all of the main characters are children, but the narrative soon jumps ahead 16 years and disproves any fears of juvenility. Through beautifully naturalistic prose, Cather relates the farming life of these settlers and their relationship with the land. It’s not all soil tilling and crop yields, however. Rest assured that the book’s primary focus is human relationships. Cather offers up an ensemble cast of characters, and the reader soon becomes deeply involved in their hopes and heartbreaks. For much of the book’s length, there are forebodings of doom on the horizon, but for the most part it is a novel of everyday lives and the choices people make. Some may describe the plot of the story or the lives of the characters as “simple,” but that would be an erroneous assessment. This is a powerful book that proceeds with quiet dignity. Cather uses prairie life as a microcosm by which to elucidate insights into universal human nature. At a time when American literature was largely confined to the spheres of New York, Boston, and San Francisco, Cather proved that gripping drama and powerful emotion could be drawn from the soil of America’s heartland.
Stylistically, the book represents a period when naturalism was just about to turn the corner into modernism. On the surface Cather’s prose is straightforward and descriptive fare, similar to that of Hamlin Garland—another regionalist master—but bubbling up between the lines is a deeper understanding of psychological and philosophical themes. Here you won’t find the verbal gymnastics of William Faulkner, but you will find something akin to the dramatic power of his rural sagas. Cather is such a master of the English language that there are very few scenes from which one can’t pluck some quotable nugget about life, love, or man’s relationship to nature.
I’m a sucker for a good peasant epic, from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth to Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, and Cather’s O Pioneers! ranks among the top exemplars of the genre. Any discussion of The Great American Novel should at least include an honorable mention for this great entry. I haven’t read Cather’s work in years, but after rereading O Pioneers! I’m eager to take a second look at the rest of the Prairie Trilogy.
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