Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.
O PIONEERS by Willa Cather (first published in 1913)
On my shelves I have four novels by Willa Cather which I had never read. When I looked up her history, I discovered that she had written a total of twelve novels as well as seven collections of short stories, not to mention much journalism. She died at a ripe old age, being born in 1873 and dying in 1947. Part of her life was growing up in what was then called by Americans “The West”, although it was far from the real West. Where she grew up was in Nebraska, down south, though much later she moved up to New York. I am not going to read and write about every one of her novels. I am sticking with the four novels that I have on my shelves – but I am reading two of her earlier novels and two of her later novels. O Pioneers was the first of her novels to be greatly admired. The title O Pioneers was taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. So to the novel.
Willa Cather is interested in the people who had settled as farmers in the prairie of Nebraska - the great variety of those pioneers who had come from many countries in Europe. She is always interested in the flora and fauna and the good earth itself, and often she tells us about the little town called Hanover that people had come to. This is how she begins : “One January day, thirty years ago the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end.”
John Bergson and his family have come from Sweden. He has a farm and has worked hard but he is dying even though he is only 46. He has a wife and four children. Before he dies he gathers his children and tells them that his daughter Alexandra is to be the master of the house. It is clear that she is the most intelligent of the family. The older boys, Oscar and Lou, agree to that. They are happy to be working in the fields while Alexandra works hard organising everything to do with money and with crops that can be planted; indeed she knows more than her brothers do about how a farm works. The youngest of the family, young Emil, is going to be sent off to school in the hope that later he will become a lawyer.
So we learn about how the family lives once the father has died. Alexandra, her mother and her brothers have outings when the weather is good. The older boys are always looking for girlfriends when they go to town. The family visits an old Russian man, Ivor, almost a hermit, who reads his bible every Sunday and is a pacifist, but he knows how to make hammocks and they need them for their barn… and later old Ivor lives in the Bergson’s barn. Alexandra always protects him from people who treat him as an oddity. She learns how to raise pigs with her brothers helping. So far, everything is going well. But then there is a drought … and it lasts for two years. The older boys want to leave the house, sell it off and go somewhere else, but Alexandra persuades them that things will improve. She takes out a number of mortgages and is able to buy a number of farms.
While walking with young Emil she says “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
The years go by. It is sixteen years since John Bergson died. The mother dies. Alexandra now has a fine house quite different from the log house that she grew up in. She can afford to hire some young Swedish girls to be her maids for cooking and cleaning. She now has a foreman, an Irish man called Barny Flinn. We are now aware of the many ethnicities that there now are in Nebraska and its Hanover… French, Bohemian, German as well as the Swedes, the Irish etc. And Alexandra now has many children about her – the children of her older brothers. One man with whom she sometimes talks is a thoughtful man called Carl Linstrum. He has a hard time working out what he wants to do in his life, and he comes and goes as he tries to find peace in different places in America – including Alaska. Quite different is her rowdy brother Lou, a loudmouth who wants to talk about politics although he does not know much about them. At the same time she is proud of her youngest brother Emil and how he diligently studies.
When Carl Linstrum looks at all the things Alexandra has done and how she has shown other farmers how to do things, he says “How in the world have you done it? How have your neighbours done it?” She replies: “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.”
More years go by. And here we are introduced to a very different tale. A Bohemian man, Frank Shabata, is married to Maria, but she is flighty. Frank is jealous of boys who flirt with her. Alexandra and her siblings often visit the Bohemian people and she often enjoys their company… and young Emil takes a shine to Maria….
At about the same time, Carl Linstrum stays at Alexandra’s home… for quite a long time. Oscar and Lou think that Carl Linstrum is going to cheat Alexandra in some way and take over her house and the many fields she owns. They say that a man should always be in charge of house and home, not a woman. She calmly reminds them that for all these years it was she who had kept the homestead going, dealt with all the money and had the ability to make them prosper. Her brothers went away. More years go by. Alexandra is on her way to being fifty. Often she finds herself dealing with old people.
Willa Cather gives us many depictions of the land, such as her description of winter: “Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.”
Later “Alexandra was well satisfied with her brother. As they drove through the rolling French country toward the westering sun and the stalwart church, she was thinking of that time long ago when she and Emil drove back from the river valley to the still unconquered Divide. Yes, she told herself, it had been worthwhile: both Emil and the country had become what she had hoped. Out of her father’s children there was one who was fit to cope with the world, who had not been tied to the pow, and who had a personality apart from the soil. And that, she reflected, was what she had worked for. She felt well satisfied with her life.”
There is a festival - a Mardi Gras organised by the French and others. It is a wonderful example of people from many ethnicities getting together… and young Emil is about to go off and become a lawyer … but he and Maria had too often been taking long romantic walks together. It is too much that Frank can bear. In a fit, he takes his gun and shoots them both dead. So in one sense the novel almost ends at a very gloomy way. There are sad funerals. Frank goes to jail almost for life. After the tears and after some months Alexandra gets permission to see Frank in jail. Why should she do this? Because she knows that Frank was a hard-working man who could never get ahead as a farmer and was always shamed. She says she forgives him for what he had done.
O Pioneers ends with Alexandra having a long talk with her friend Carl Linstrum. Sentimental readers might think that they would marry but no such thing happens. However they remain good friends. Alexandra speaks of the earth and the homestead and says: “Lou and Oscar can’t see those things….Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it for a little while.”
And the last words of the novel are “They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!”
Now that I have read O Pioneers I can see it as a story of struggle and failure and sometimes success. In that respect, Willa Cather gives us a view of those who came from many countries and had to make something of the bleak prairie of Nebraska. Willa Cather also has a strong sense of the land itself - flowers, birds, fish, trees, hills. Sometimes it almost reads like poetry. Towards the end though, there is a bit of melodrama in the deaths of Emil and Maria.
In telling you all this I am missing one major thing. It was unusual to have, as the main character, a woman who is in charge of men. In Alexandra we have a strong woman who is more intelligent than her brothers. Willa Cather was an early feminist and in a way she was man-ish. Biographies of her tell us that as a child she got on better with her brothers than with her sisters because she thought girls games were silly. She never sort a husband for an obvious reason. She wanted a female partner – not a man - and for most of her later years she had one. Was she a lesbian? Probably, but then people were more discreet in those days.
