O PIONEERS!

When I reviewed Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far from a Madding Crowd (see my review of 1/26/2015), I asked the question, “Can anybody write better prose…” Well, Willa Cather’s 1913 novel comes close. Here are some samples: The crazy Norwegian, Ivar, who lived like a hobbit in the Nebraska hillside, is described as, “He was a queerly shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on short bow-legs. His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks, made him look older than he was.” How about a boy swinging his scythe (that’s how they cut the grass in those days) in a graveyard, “He was a splendid figure of a boy, tall and straight as a young pine tree, with a handsome head, and stormy gray eyes, deeply set under a serious brow. The space between his two front teeth, which were unusually far apart..” or, “Milly was fifteen, fat and jolly and pompadoured, with creamy complexion, square white teeth, and a short upper lip.” or, two woman, Marie and Alexandra, talking to each other outdoors on a sunny day, “They made a pretty picture in the strong sunlight, the leafy pattern surrounding them like a net; the Swedish woman so white and gold, kindly and amused, but armored in calm, and the alert brown one, her full lips parted, points of yellow light dancing in her eyes as she laughed and chattered.” Okay, so now you know Willa could write.

Thomas Hardy’s above mentioned novel and Willa Cather’s novel share a similar plot.  Both protagonists inherit a farm, Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba from her uncle in the late 1800s England, and Alexandra from her father in turn of the 20th century Nebraska. The Nebraska area was populated with many recent immigrants; mostly Swedish, Norwegian, German, Bohemian and French trying their hand as first time farmers. Droughts and poor soil resulted in crop failure for most of them. Our heroine, Alexandra Bergson (about 12 years old at the time) promises her dying dad that she will not lose the farm, and, in fact, will find ways to make it highly successful. Her two older brothers, Lou and Oscar, want to give up and leave the area. Alexandra’s younger brother, Emil is on her side. Alexandra talks the boys into mortgaging the farm to buy up more land in hopes that the land will eventually become valuable...making them wealthy landowners. As the years and tears go by, Alexandra has made a success of the farm. Alexandra gives Lou and Oscar their own land and sends Emil to college. Life is good, but Alexandra is lonely. Her sorta boyfriend, Carl Linstrum, had to move with his family many years ago to St. Louis, because his father got a job in a cigar factory. Carl, now 35 years old, returns to visit Alexandra, but Lou and Oscar see him as a charlatan wanting to weasel Alexandra out of her money. Is it true? Or is it really Lou and Oscar who want her land?

Willa Cather treats the two romances in the novel almost as sidebar events. I never saw them coming until just before they developed. The courting of Alexandra by Carl almost never happened since he moved away so long ago and was on his way to Alaska to gold pan when he decided to visit Alexandra. He was fifteen years old when he left with his family to St. Louis and now he was thirty five. He only wanted to stay overnight, but Alexandra stretched-out his stay for months. The neighbors started talking and the two older boys objected to his continued sojourn. They eventually forced him out of town. Will Carl and Alexandra be reunited in the future? The second romance between Alexandra’s youngest son, Emil, and Marie Shabata (nee Tovesky) was purely on the sly since Marie was married. I didn’t anticipate the results of the romances... were they going to be tragic, hopeful, or a combination thereof? Throughout the novel, Willa Cather had a way of hiding things from the reader... then she would turn the crank on the jack-in-the-box and something unexpected would pop out. This is not your typical cowboys and indians novel like the ones that were typically being written by authors like Zane Grey or Owen Wister. Did Willa Cather title her novel after Walt Whitman’s poem, Pioneers! O Pioneers! (yes, she did), first published in 1865 in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Yes, it was the days of Horace Greeley’s Go West Young Man, let the Manifest Destiny start.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: From the introduction and notes by Chris Kraus:

Considered one of the great figures of early-twentieth-century American literature, Willa Cather derived her inspiration from the American Midwest, which she considered her home. Never married, she cherished her many friendships, some of which she had maintained since childhood. Her intimate coterie of women writers and artists motivated Cather to produce some of her best work. Sarah Orne Jewett, a successful author from Maine whom Cather had met during her McClure’s years, inspired her to devote herself full-time to creating literature and to write about her childhood, which she did in several novels of the prairies; one of the best known is O Pioneers! (1913), whose title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman. A critic of the rise of materialism, Cather addressed the social impact of the developing industrial age in A Lost Lady (1923) which was made into a film starring Barbara Stanwyck. For One of Ours (1922), a novel about World War I, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
 
On April / 24 /1947 Willa Cather dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in her Madison Avenue apartment in New York City. She is buried in New Hampshire. She was 74 years old.