Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Carl is a pale, melancholic character; the other ‘returning’ figure, Emil, embodies all the eroticism and excitability so carefully omitted from Carl and Alexandra’s friendship. He has been brought up by Alexandra to have interests other than the land, has gone to university, and is meant for a lawyer. Emil has something of Carl’s impatience with the hard Nebraskan pastoral (‘ “I get tired of seeing men and horses going up and down, up and down” ’ [OP, p.156]) but he is driven away – to Mexico and back – more by his passion for Marie, who ran away from her convent at eighteen and married a handsome Bohemian ‘buck’, Frank Shabata, now a difficult and resentful husband. The inevitable romantic tragedy is simply told, like an old tale of passion and revenge. After Emil and Marie’s deaths, and Frank Shabata’s imprisonment, the book is given back to Alexandra and her destiny. But the closing celebration of her relationship to the land now has a muted, elegiac tone.

  Like the land, Cather said in a letter to Elsie,2 the work had no skeleton, it was all soft form with no hard lines or bold modelling. This telling remark is partly deceptive: there is in fact a strong, clear, two-part form to the novel, and it is concerned with the making and inheriting of forms. But it is true, and crucial, that there are no hard lines. A male narrative of driving action, struggle and climax is refused. Instead the form is gradual, surveying, circular, full of pauses and retrospects. It builds up not through a suspenseful linear progression, but through careful associations and juxtapositions, and so it is like Alexandra: in a sense, she is the book. Cather makes this explicit in a passage about memory which is also a passage about writing. It follows a remembered scene of happiness between Alexandra and Emil, watching a solitary wild duck playing under some willow trees:

  Most of Alexandra’s happy memories were as impersonal as this one; yet to her they were very personal. Her mind was a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things. Not many people would have cared to read it; only a happy few. She had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows. She had grown up in serious times. [OP, p.205]

  Like the beginning of the novel, the passage makes a shape out of negatives. Alexandra’s white book, the tabula rasa inscribed by her destiny, is analogous to the white space of the land, which takes shape as we read the book, and to the white pages on which Cather is writing a hitherto unwritten woman’s pioneer novel. The description applies equally to her heroine, to the countryside she is identified with, and to the kind of text she requires, which will select its own readers by virtue of its special qualities. (Pastoral, it is implied, has become an élite genre, only acceptable to the few.) This negative description of Alexandra’s personality suggests to us what her text omits: no psychological complexity, no sexual passion (the white book implies virginity), no preoccupation with relationships, no business interests that are not rendered spiritual by her commitment to the land (Cather carefully keeps Alexandra clean of the kind of sharp dealing carried on offstage by Charlie Fuller the real estate man, the first of her hard-headed successful crooks), no politics (Lou is given these, disparagingly), no modern self-consciousness or ennui (Carl has that, and is kept on the edges of the book), ‘not the least spark of cleverness’. Instead, her personality is ‘impersonal’, built out of its relation to nature and its preservation of memory: it is a white book of associations and contemplation.

  This passage is at the centre of a careful accumulation of images that make us feel Alexandra as a life-force as much as an individual. Just before the ‘white book’ passage, her ‘personality’, ‘her own realization of herself’, is described as ‘submerged’, like ‘an underground river’. Just after, there is a strange, powerful passage about Alexandra’s mystic lover. In bed as a child, and later when she is very tired, she has the sensation of being carried by a strong male figure across the fields, a fantasy which, in youth, she always reacted against by fiercely washing ‘the gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far’. [OP, p.206] It is an extraordinarily bold idea (in what is also a realist novel) of the heroine as a chaste Diana, an Amazon, her body consecrated to the ‘genius’ of the land. When she has decided to put her faith in the high land, Emil sees her looking at it with ‘love and yearning’, as if raising her face to her spirit-lover.3 ‘The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman’, [OP, p.65] the narrator comments famously, getting away with this pious generalization because she makes Alexandra embody it with such calm confidence. When Carl comes to see her before going away he finds her in her garden, ‘not working’, but like Keats’s Autumn, supervising the riches of the land, surrounded by pumpkins and drying vines, ‘lost in thought, leaning upon her pitchfork’. [OP, p.48] At the end of the novel’s first section, before the land has been conquered, Alexandra’s faith in it is described, like an author’s, as both attentive to detail – she identifies with the insects and the ‘small wild things’ hidden in the grass – and transcendent, in touch with cosmic order: she likes to think of the ‘ordered march’ of the stars, ‘it fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature’. [OP, p.70]

  ‘Fortified’, ‘reflect’, ‘operations’: the language is purposely formal and impersonal. When Carl comes back after sixteen years and finds a fruitful land, Alexandra describes the change as having happened in spite of her; she did it ‘just by sitting still’. She seems to have the magical efficacy of a nature-god:4 Carl says to her, comparing their art work: ‘ “I’ve been away engraving other men’s pictures, and you’ve stayed at home and made your own.” ’ [OP, p.116] The ‘white book’ – obscure destiny, wild land, pioneering text – has been shaped and coloured; Alexandra is felt to be creator and writer as well as pioneer. Paradoxically, she makes the picture by sitting still and looking beyond the immediate scene, as though the true artist is always going beyond the close-up picture to the ‘great operations’.

  But the ‘white book’ passage is also practical and realistic. Alexandra has to be read both as mythical super-being and as a Swedish farm-manager in late nineteenth-century Nebraska. When she describes herself as part of nature, it is in practical terms: ‘ “If you take even a vine and cut it back again and again, it grows hard, like a tree.” ’ [OP, p.171] Her eyes may be fixed with a dreaming look on the moon over the pasture, but eventually they go back ‘to the sorghum patch south of the barn, where she was planning to make her new pig corral’. Her mystic faith in the land is also (as she points out firmly to her brothers) a shrewd conviction of the potential value of alfalfa.

  The fusion of the contemplative and the functional in Alexandra’s pastoral life is eloquently, and oddly, illustrated through her affinity to ‘Crazy Ivar’. This Norwegian Thoreau, learning his Bible in his sod house by the pool where migrating birds converge, banning all guns from his terrain, his hair uncut and his feet bare, is a figure who combines classical and biblical pastoral:5

  He best expressed his preference for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant. [OP, p.38]

  Alexandra’s bond with Ivar is part of her magical affinity with the land – he understands the birds, he tells old animistic legends of a boy possessed by a snake. When she takes this troll-like figure under her protection she is staying in touch with the primitive relation of the pioneer to nature. (Hence her patronage of Ivar is greatly disliked by the Americanized brothers, who want to tidy him away into an asylum.) But it is also a practical bond: when she first goes to see him it is to ask him how she should keep her hogs; he knows how to make hammocks and cure sick animals; and though he can’t read or speak American, like Alexandra he can read and interpret the orderly text of
nature’s ‘great operations’, such as the migrations of birds: ‘ “They have their roads up there, as we have down here….Never any confusion; just like soldiers who have been drilled.” ’ [OP, p.43] He embodies the ‘georgic’ pastoral of works and days – labour, sympathy, reiteration – as expressed by Alexandra to Carl: ‘ “Our lives are like the years, all made up of weather and crops and cows” ’ [OP, p.131] and by Carl to Alexandra: ‘ “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” ’ [OP, p.119]

  This carefully simplified text of repetition sanctified by association doesn’t allow for personal involvement. Alexandra’s story is ascetic and impersonal. The georgic pastoral tradition allows Cather to project her own sexuality into a female figure who is at once nurturing, heroic and indifferent to sexual passion. But this creates a narrative difficulty which will always be acute: how to attach a heterosexual emotional life to a character whose strength comes from her transcendence of usual sexual roles? Our own resistance to the idea of Alexandra in love is articulated by characters in the novel. ‘ “Alexandra’s never been in love” ’ Emil says. “She wouldn’t know how to go about it. The idea!” ’ [OP, p.154] For Emil and Marie, love is intensely present and momentary. For Alexandra (as for many of Cather’s central figures) love is memory. When Carl decides to go away, they rehearse their affinities by way of leave-taking: ‘ “We’ve liked the same things and we’ve liked them together.” ’ [OP, p.52] While he is away he dwells on his memories of her as a girl, and when he returns he goes over his memory of those memories. In them she appears as sunshiny, vigorous and youthful (‘She looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning’ [OP, p.126]), but these sexual qualities are muted through the double retrospect. When Carl and Alexandra finally kiss, it is ‘softly’; she leans ‘heavily’ against him and says she is very tired. It’s as if she is being put, not into a lover’s bed, but into a peaceful grave.

  Alexandra’s elegiac asceticism puts her out of touch with passionate young love. It’s one of the subtlest things in the book that she fails to observe Emil’s feelings for Marie until it’s too late, and that her tranquil fatalism even irritates Marie. The difference between Alexandra’s ‘georgic’ pastoral and Emil and Marie’s eclogue – a brilliant and apparently simple achievement – can be felt by comparing Alexandra’s ‘white book’ passage with Emil’s last ride to Marie:

  Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream. He could feel nothing but the sense of diminishing distance. It seemed to him that his mare was flying, or running on wheels, like a railway train. The sunlight, flashing on the window-glass of the big red barns, drove him wild with joy. He was like an arrow shot from the bow. His life poured itself out along the road before him as he rode to the Shabata farm. [OP, pp.257–8]

  Alexandra’s ‘marking’ of her life is nourishing and accumulative; as it is for her narrator, everything is ‘clear’ and everything is saved up. Emil’s perception, by contrast, is evanescent, blurred, spendthrift. Bypassing ‘sweet’ images of domestic husbandry (not for him) he is transfigured into water, light, joy, speed, elements at once sexual and mortal: what is poured out could be life’s blood as much as semen or love song. All this rushes past as ‘in a dream’, and when he finds Marie lying in the orchard under the mulberry tree, she is already dreaming of him.6

  The narrative gives the lovers’ dream-romance no chance in the real world; no surprise attaches to the tragedy. From the first, the writing for Emil and Marie links death and love in naturalistic images of helpless creatures. This is made more poignant because the vantage point is often Carl’s or Alexandra’s, with their melancholy sense of mortality and recurrence. The young friends, undeclared lovers who hardly understand their own feelings, are first seen by Carl shooting ducks together. The contrast with Alexandra is obvious: Marie is first excited, then distressed, as she sees the blood dripping from ‘the live color that still burned on its plumage.’ [OP, p.128] She is always associated in this way with tender, vulnerable animal life. Alexandra compares her to ‘a little brown rabbit’. [OP, p.133] ‘ “Am I flighty?” ’ Marie asks Emil in the orchard. ‘ “I suppose that’s the wet season, too, then. It’s exciting to see everything growing so fast.” ’ [OP, p.150] When they at last acknowledge their love it is in the dark surrounded by fireflies; when Marie is longing for Emil she creeps out of the house like ‘a white night-moth out of the fields’, feeling the weight of the years to come, ‘like the land’, not – as Alexandra does – as an inspiring prospect, but as a burden, chaining her ‘instinct to live’. [OP, p.248]

  The lovers are kept picturesque and simple. The story of Marie’s marriage is potentially more complex, but it is not allowed to take over. We see Frank Shabata, the glamorous newcomer from Bohemia, charming all the girls with his curls and his yellow cane, turning into a resentful, self-pitying, angry farmer, unsuited to the life, who quarrels with all his neighbours and bullies his once-adoring wife. His slide into annihilation – the muddled, panic-stricken killing of the lovers, his dehumanization in jail (‘ “You know, I most forgit dat woman’s name” ’ [OP, p.295]) – is very strong. Cather gives Frank and Marie only a few scenes together, but enough to show their difficulties. Like Browning’s Duke with his ‘last Duchess’, Frank is jealous of Marie for being universally agreeable. He wants to crush her spirit: ‘The spark of her life went somewhere else, and he was always watching to surprise it.’[OP, p.222] Marie, who is much more adult and acute about Frank than about Emil, understands this: ‘ “The trouble is” ’ (she says to Alexandra) ‘ “you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not. Then what are you going to do about it?” ’ [OP, p.197]

  There is a feminist argument here, as strong as anything Cather would write. Just as the older brothers ineffectually try to contain Alexandra in a traditional, subordinate role (‘ “The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family” ’ [OP, p.169]), so Frank wants to bend ‘dat woman’ to his will. Alexandra survives by transcending all ‘roles’, and by taking over the land which had been, up to then, male property.7 Marie, by contrast, is destroyed by her traditional femaleness. This is strongly felt. But the Shabata marriage has also to be played into the pastoral. Frank, as well as being a self-destructive male chauvinist, is also part of the mythical, legendary texture, a Polyphemus to the lovers’ Acis and Galatea, who comes upon them in their Arcadian Eden,8 the lush, wild orchard, where Marie can become a Dryad: ‘ “I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything else.” ’ [OP, p.153] It is characteristic of the novel’s mixing of myth and reality that Marie can be, in one breath, a Dryad and a ‘good Catholic’ girl.

  The lovers’ natural, secret desires are attractively set against the public, communal life of their friends in the French Catholic district. In part this is a contrast between the sanctioned and the illicit: Emil bitterly compares his own hopeless longing with his friend Amédée’s ‘sunny, natural, happy love’, and the stages of Amédée’s and Angélique’s story – young marriage, first child, Amédée’s sudden death, the grief of his friends – are marked by scenes of church festivity and ritual which the narrator finds (as she always will) gracious and consolatory, though Emil feels cut off from them. One of the novel’s most spectacular scenes, the climax of its public moments, done in strong colours and bold strokes, is the joint preparation at the French church for the great confirmation service and for Amédée’s funeral. The troups of boys – ‘the Church’s cavalry’ – riding across the fields to greet and escort the visiting Bishop, averting their ey
es from the new grave to the gold cross on the church’s steeple; the church half filled with mourners in black, half with white communicants; the rapturous singing of a Rossini Mass and of Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’, are all in dramatic contrast to the lovers’ secret sanctuary of natural desires, or to Alexandra’s and old Ivar’s transcendental, simplified, mystic union with nature. Cather worried later about having forced these different immigrant cultures too much together in the novel.9 But she should not have: it is one of the book’s great charms that they are so smoothly reconciled by the controlling narrator. And in fact she makes the Catholic community part of the classical scene: the ‘Church’s cavalry’, those eager groups of boys of whom Amédée is the boldest and the best, are always seen outdoors, ‘jumping and wrestling and throwing the discus’. [OP, p.159] Cather can even turn a Nebraskan baseball game into an Olympiad.

  O Pioneers! is a deceptive book. It is an ‘early’ novel, her first full-length treatment of her true subject, which is also impressively mature and achieved, its plain style and concealed organization giving off a very strong sense of control. It is at once celebratory and elegiac; about pioneering, but also about the lost past. Its sustained effect is of simplicity, a ‘white book’ with few clear marks. And yet it contains a complex interweaving of cultural detail and historical perspective, and makes a sophisticated grafting of an American subject onto a classical form.