"Hell, I even thought I was dead 'til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska."-- Gene Hackman as Little Bill Daggett, UnforgivenWilla Cather's opening description of Nebraska is unlikely to find its way into the Cornhusker State's tourism bureau pamphlets. She describes the fictional town of Hanover as near to being blown away by a howling wind; she describes low drab buildings; a gray sky; a gray prairie. The Nebraska of O Pioneers! is hard, unforgiving, yet tempting; it is a land that is waiting to be tamed, though it will break many dreams before giving its reward. As a Minnesotan transplanted to Nebraska, I have spent much of the past decade trying to explain "the middle of the middle west" (I always try to work a Counting Crows reference into any mention of Nebraska). Usually, I start with low property taxes, segue into Conor Oberst, and then suggest a visit to Gerald Ford's birth home before I break down in tears at my own broken dreams. What I'm trying to say is that Willa Cather sure didn't do Nebraska any favors. But she's right about that wind. Cather's O Pioneers! is like The Little House on the Prairie shorn of Laura Ingles Wilder's Pollyannaish revisionism. It focuses on the Bergsons, namely, Alexandra and Emil. Alexandra is the beloved daughter of John Bergson, a failed farmer who is dying as the novel begins. He leaves the homestead in Alexandra's charge. Alexandra is a tough-minded individual, and she has the guts of a 21st century American in the way she leverages multiple mortgages to eventually carve out a minor farm empire. As described by Cather:There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.The book makes great chronological leaps with each chapter, and in the ensuing decades - Alexandra starts as a sixteen year-old - she gets lonelier and lonelier, never taking a husband and remaining, we are to infer, a virgin. This doesn't seem to bother her much. She has a mild flirtation with a milquetoast named Carl Linstrum, who keeps leaving and returning, but that's it. I'm sure Cather, who was dogged by lesbian rumors herself, wrote Alexandra from her heart. In any event, Alexandra is headed down the spinster's road: instead of a bunch of cats, she hordes Swedish house-girls and devotes her great energies to running the farm and looking out for Emil. Emil is the youngest of the Bergson brood. I imagined him as Brad Pitt circa-A River Runs Through It. A golden child of sorts. Charismatic. A dreamer. A wanderer. He goes to college. He goes to Mexico. And late in the novel, he gets set to travel to Omaha to "read law." The girls seem to love him, yet he has eyes for only one girl: Marie. Unfortunately, Marie, who is a beautiful, vibrant girl, for whom life exists to be experienced fully (she reacts to everything as a Justin Bieber fan reacts to Justin Bieber), is married to Frank Shabata. Frank was a dandy once, with a yellow cane and everything, but once married, he becomes something of a misanthrope. The only thing that makes him happy is making Marie sad. He's a definite precursor to Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan. So those are the ingredients to the story: the interaction and fates of Alexandra, Emil, Carl, Marie, and Frank. There are some other peripheral characters as well: Emil's French friend, who tries to hook him up with French girls (what I like to call a great friend); Alexandra's two other brothers, Lou and Oscar, also known as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (I imagine these two were Adam and Eve of University of Nebraska football fans); and Ivar, a crazy Russian - is there any other kind? - who doesn't believe in hurting animals and is a neighborhood horse whisperer. This is about all I'll say about the plot. The reason being is that it came as such a pleasant suprise to me. Sure, things seemed to be meandering for a while, but it's getting somewhere, and that somewhere has never been ruined the way that the endings of other famous novels have been ruined. (This is likely a function of the fact that the film presentation of O Pioneers! was a TV movie of the week from 1992 starring Jessica Lange, David Strathairn, Anne Heche (!!) and a young Heather Graham). What can I say, without spoiling anything? Well, for one, Cather is a beautiful writer, especially in her evocation of the land. O Pioneers! is sort of Steinbeck-lite. There is great emphasis on geography, family conflict, and a pretty, parable-like simplicity to the language. Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in the west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark moving mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in the herd from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill to open the corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.The other thing I noticed was the book's emphasis on youth verses youth's opposite (oldness? aging?). I always get a little nervous when I attempt to pick out thematic elements, since I'm not an English major and definitely don't read like one. I'm pretty comfortable with this observation, though, since Cather hits it pretty hard, especially in the comparison between Emil (Brad Pitt from A River Runs Through It) and Alexandra (the cat lady from The Simpsons). I'm too young to talk like I'm old - since it just gets worse every day - but I'm too old to feel young. It's interesting how that works: how our mindset, the very essence of our beings, changes with the years. I realized, as I was reading this book, that I have absolutely no idea what it feels like to be a teenager or young adult. You know, that time in your life when your heart is an open wound, and everything in the world is salt; when every high moment is glory and every low moment doom. Life and death hinging on a date, a kiss, a partner for the prom. Actually, I remember that time in theory. I recall having a vague notion, once upon a time, that all I needed was love, or more specifically, the love of this one girl named Kim I had a crush on when I was sixteen. I figured that everything would follow after. Oh, what an idiot! My present-self has only disdain for my sixteen-year-old self (who didn't end up with Kim, by the way). No matter how much love you have, you're still going to worry about your job, your rent, your student loans, and the weird noise your 2001 Ford Escape makes when you turn the wheel. It's only when you're young do you feel that all else recedes before love. It's only when you're young are you certain that no one else "understands" the world as you. I no longer understand. So I guess that makes me an adult. But I had flashes, while reading O Pioneers!, of that gloriously stupid feeling of youth and love:Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before her like the land...always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain - until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released...When she reached the stile she sat down and waited. How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!Yes! That's what it was like! Captured perfectly. That was how I was! My sleepless nights, my premature fatalism, my notebooks filled with tragic short stories about the boy who loved so much, and yet died alone. Cather brings youth alive, and she does a great job contrasting those strained yearnings with Alexandra's wisdom and maturity. O Pioneers! is a gem I might totally have overlooked if (a) I hadn't read a great Goodreads review; and (b) I didn't have it sitting fortuitously on my book shelf. When you are young, you are, by default, in love. It is like being on drugs. A drug that makes you senseless, overwrought, emotional, and utterly insufferable to everyone around you who is old enough to legally drink. And when you grow out of that stage, as everyone does, you lose something you can't even name. It's impossible to recapture that goofy, giddy, hopeful sensation you used to have when your heart was certain it needed only one thing. And that, I suppose, is why adults have alcohol.
Alexandra looked at him mournfully. “I try to be more liberal about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are not all made alike.”Everything in O Pioneers! is beauty to me. I am so in love with this book. Maybe it is because I have it in my brain that pioneers by definition suck that Willa Cather always catches me by surprise and turns me upside down. It’s like walking through an alien landscape and then running into my best friend. I thought what I would find was Michael Landon crying into a butter churn, and here you are, everything that is wonderful about humans. Still, I never know whether to recommend that other people read this book, or whether it is better to just keep it to myself. As Alexandra says, we are not all made alike, and maybe what is beauty and revelation to me is Michael Landon crying into a butter churn to you.It’s so easy to say why I hate writing and difficult to say why I love it. I want to compare Cather to Hemingway because of how steady and careful their writing is, because of how speculation about their lives cheapens conversations about their stories, but no. I want to say Cather writes what is in my soul, but that’s not right either. What she writes is as much her own world as it is my reality, but that doesn’t make her wisdom easy or her power arrogant. She is not looking for my approval, but she is looking outside herself for some kind of truth.At a particularly conflicted time in my life, I went to a club with some friends and I saw a girl dancing like I have never seen anyone dance in my life. She had cleared out as space for herself to the side of the stage, and it was like every part of her body was electric. It was not only beautiful, it was also full of life. Where I didn’t know which way to turn, this girl was in the Place, doing the Thing. Reading O Pioneers! is like watching that girl. Everything is alive in this book. But, again, I’m struck by the feeling that it may not be alive to you as it is to me. I’ll give you a few descriptions as objectively as I can, and you can judge for yourself. It is about contrasts: country and city, speed and slowness, youth and age, passion and steadiness, inspiration and hard work, deprivation and entitlement. It is operatic. It is kooky at times and kind, but not funny. It is understated and even-handed. It is written by a woman. It is about women and men, who are all sometimes as passionate as people are, and other times as wise as people should be. It is specific, but not petty. There are awkward parts (specifically book 2, chapter 9, though I even think that scene is beautiful).It’s difficult to talk about this book without spoiling it, and I think a spoiler would really spoil the story. So, I’ll just say one last thing that I hope won’t be a spoiler, but might, so be warned. People get angry with authors who won’t let their characters die and see it as a sign of accomplished writing to kill a character. I think, because of that, I see a lot of bad storytelling mistaken for good storytelling if the author tortures or kills the characters. I really hate when people think character abuse is maturity. At the same time, though, I think there is something right about trusting an author more if the author allows unhappiness into the story. Authors are writing to an audience, and I think they should be writing to entertain, so there is value to me in making stories better than life. At the same time, there is truth in sadness, and if a writer can’t look at sadness, she has sacrificed truth to entertainment. Cather balances truth and entertainment in a way that is completely devastating. She loves her characters, and lets every one of them grow as humans grow, with human joys and human tragedies. It is painful and beautiful to watch. I almost want to read this book again right away, but too much wisdom in one month can’t be good for my health. I’ll take a little break first and watch some reality TV to balance out my wisdom intake. Just, you know, for my health.
What do You think about O Pioneers! (1992)?
Willa Cather appears to write so effortlessly or, perhaps, I should say, her prose reads so effortlessly. Her characters ring true and the land looms over them all. Of course Cather lived on that prairie and knew that land. Cather knew farm families like the Bergsons and possibly a woman like Alexandra Bergson, whose life was fully formed and influenced by the land.There are different views of the land's influence on its people: "John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. but this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did."(p 14)It would fall to Alexandra to lead her family in taming the land as best she could, trying to keep the promise made to her father. After a trip to look at land in another area, Alexandra rides home with her young brother Emil. "When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." (p 35)Alexandra and her brothers work tirelessly, as do their neighbors. This story is an anthem to those farmers who gave everything to the land, some loving it, some despising it. They are the forerunners of the remaining family farms of today.One last quote just because I like it's picture of the season: "Winter had settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks in 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 to his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put 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...One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever." (p 97)But formidable people such as Alexandra saw the possibility of spring returning.Highly recommended
—Sue
Why should romantics read this book? Because it might slap a little sense into them. Of all the Cather I've read, this is her book that's most in love with the land, while recognizing that it is not anthropomorphic, or even like an animal. The land does not love you back. It's much bigger than you are, sort of like God, only, of course, minus the love thing. This doesn't mean you shouldn't invest yourself in it. It only means that you may not get anything back. Which is, again, a fairly religious outlook; it's just that it's a tough one. Faith is what it is. There are no guarantees.
—Hillary
From a set of clippings about Willa Cather that my grandmother saved, I found out that even though Cather was so deeply rooted in Nebraska, she was actually buried in Jaffrey, N.H., where she wanted to be laid facing Mt. Monadnock. This goes a long way in showing how connected Cather felt to land in general, a characteristic of her personality that emerges in so much of her writing. I remember in my teenage impatience, I skipped through a lot of the descriptions of the Nebraska land when I read "My Antonia," but with a more practiced eye, this time I enjoyed them. Perhaps it was because the main character, Alexandra Bergson, stakes her entire life on the land, that the farmland and prairie almost become another character. Instead of marrying and having children, Alexandra's family is the land and the various misfits that she takes in is her family. But the precariously independent position that she assumes causes the reader to feel even more acutely every loss she endures. Because she has asked for so little for herself, the sympathetic reader wants even more for her. Like the Midwestern prairie that Cather writes about, its pioneers are hard to people to know, which makes for difficult character development. Even stoic Alexandra at times is inaccessible and the chapters alloted the lovely Marie Tovesky and golden boy Emil Bergson feel perfunctory. Even so, it doesn't take away from the final, heartbreaking denouement since enough time was spent on the two to understand the profundity of the outcome--Alexandra loses her baby brother and her best friend in one fell swoop. In so many ways, Alexandra represents a community. She is the figurehead for the pioneers that weathered the hardest of times and never gave up. She symbolizes the stoicism and endurance of a people that defined themselves by the land out of which they made themselves. Her blighted success speaks of the the hard fact that no matter how much security and money they built up, they were still not immune to life's saddest events. In a joyous way, this book is one of the earliest feminist writings in American literature and can be appreciated for the effect that it probably had coming out in 1913.
—snackywombat (v.m.)
