Happy Birthday, “O Pioneers!”

In the old days, women writers tended to start their careers late, and I’ll bet that, on average, they still do. When I was young, people trying to encourage us held up the example of George Eliot, whose first novel, “Adam Bede,” was published when she was almost forty. Later, we learned a more amazing story, that of Penelope Fitzgerald, who started publishing fiction at the age of nearly sixty and, before dying at eighty-three, brought out nine novels and had a brilliant career. She won the Man Booker Prize.

Another member of this group was Willa Cather (1873-1947), from Red Cloud, Nebraska, the daughter of a small-time insurance agent with five children and no money. Somehow Cather managed to go to college, and to become a writer, of small things: reviews, stories. By her thirties, she had acquired a very good job, as the managing editor of McClures, an important New York magazine. She got to go to Europe and meet famous writers. But secretly she herself wanted to be a writer. She was sure she could not be. The most honored novelist of that time, the nineteen-tens, was Henry James: refined, complicated, urban. Cather, meanwhile, was still kicking the dust of Red Cloud off her shoes. Finally, at thirty-seven, in what must have been a wrenching act of courage, she took a leave from McClures and wrote a novel, “Alexander’s Bridge.” It was in the manner of James, and it was a dud, as she knew from the moment it was published.

A crucial difference, I think, between successful and unsuccessful artists is the ability to survive disappointment. Logically, after the failure of “Alexander’s Bridge,” Cather should have given up. She had always figured she couldn’t make it as a novelist. Here, apparently, was the proof. But for some reason that no one has ever been able to explain, she immediately sat down and wrote a second novel, “O Pioneers!,” which obeyed the fiction-writing-workshop dictum “Write what you know.” The subjects of “Alexander’s Bridge”—fashionable people drinking tea and committing adultery—were matters of which Cather knew nothing. She had made it all up, out of books. What she knew was European peasants, in soiled clothes, moving to the Great Plains via the Homestead Act and trying to establish farms on land covered with tall, fibrous, seemingly ineradicable prairie grass.

“O Pioneers!” concerns Swedish immigrants. We see their plight in the very first words of the novel:


The wind blew under the houses. It’s like “The Wizard of Oz.”

As the first chapter opens, a five-year-old boy, Emil Bergson, is crying his eyes out. He and his older sister—Alexandra, twenty years old—have come into town to get supplies. Alexandra dotes on Emil, and she let him bring his kitten with him. Now, a dog has chased the kitten up a telegraph pole, where she is freezing, but she won’t come down. A friend of Alexandra’s, Carl Linstrum, hikes up the pole and rescues the kitten. Other animals in “O Pioneers!” are not so lucky, nor are the human beings.

Soon after the beginning of the novel, Alexandra’s father, age forty-six, dies. His struggle with his homestead had been brutal: one year, he lost his pigs to cholera. The next year, his cattle froze to death in a blizzard. Two sons died. What remained to him were three boys and Alexandra. He wished that she, too, had been a boy, because she seemed to him the only one smart enough to save the farm. (One of the boys, Oscar, is a blockhead; another, Lou, is flighty; the third, Emil, the one with the kitten, is a child.) Alexandra does not feel up to the task. Watching her father die, she wishes in her heart that the whole family could die with him, and “let the grass grow back over everything.” But by the end of the novel, she has domesticated, and enlarged, the property. In the process, she has lost her gaiety and her femininity. Oscar and Lou resent the fact that she, a female, is the one who runs the farm, and they chide her for being unwomanly. (We should give a thought, here, to what must have been the ambivalence that Cather, a manly woman, felt about how well she managed McClures.) Alexandra is stung by her brothers’ remarks: “I certainly didn’t choose to be the kind of girl I was. If you take a vine and cut it back and back again, it grows hard, like a tree.”

She still loves beauty, though. In one of the most touching moments in the novel, she and Emil, on a journey, stop to rest by a river:

Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun. In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had seemed to Alexandra so beautiful as that wild duck.… Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight.

In the novel, there is a human counterpart to the little duck: Alexandra’s neighbor and her only female friend, Marie Shabata—happy and vivacious, with sparkling brown eyes. As Alexandra does not have the imagination to realize, Emil is in love with Marie, and she with him. They don’t speak their love. Marie is married. She decides to simply cherish her emotion, “as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain.” Standing next to a pond by moonlight, “she felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon … when it encircled and swelled with that image of gold.” In American fiction of that period—even in pornography, I think—it would be hard to find an image as passionate as that. Emil goes to Mexico to try to forget Marie. But soon he returns, and one day, forgetting himself, he runs to the orchard where he knows that Marie takes her nap every afternoon. Cather was fundamentally a Platonist; she believed that vision was more real than reality. And so, as Emil rushes through the orchard,

long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light. Emil went softly between the cherry trees toward the wheatfield. When he came to the corner, he stopped short and put his hand over his mouth. Marie was lying on her side under the white mulberry tree, her face half hidden in the grass, her eyes closed.… Emil threw himself down beside her and took her in his arms. The blood came back to her cheeks, her amber eyes, opened slowly, and in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun. “I was dreaming this,” she whispered, hiding her face against him, “don’t take my dream away!”

He takes her dream away, makes it a reality. At which point, Marie’s rightly suspicious husband, hearing murmurs and coming to investigate, raises his .405 Winchester and shoots the lovers. Emil dies instantly.

But for Marie Shabata it had not been so easy. One ball had torn through her right lung, another had shattered the carotid artery. She must have started up and gone toward the hedge, leaving a trail of blood. There she had fallen and bled. From that spot there was another trail, heavier than the first, where she must have dragged herself back to Emil’s body. Once there, she seemed not to have struggled anymore. She had lifted her head to her lover’s breast, taken his hand in both her own, and bled quietly to death. She was lying on her right side in an easy and natural position, her cheek on Emil’s shoulder. On her face there was a look of ineffable content.… The hand she held was covered with dark stains, where she had kissed it.

Alexandra Bergson thus loses the only two things she really loved, her friend Marie and her adored Emil.

Others of Cather’s books—for example, “The Professor’s House”—are sadder than “O Pioneers!,” because, being less romantic, they are harder to regard as a fiction. But this is the one that takes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism. Alexandra’s friend Carl, the one who saved the kitten, says to himself about the prairie “that men were too weak to make any mark there, that the land wanted to be left alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.” For Cather, I believe, this was true not just of Nebraska but of life. It wasn’t going to be your friend. You wonder, How could Cather, in her first novel (forget “Alexander’s Bridge”), have been so sure of sorrow? But, as I said, she started late. She was thirty-nine when “O Pioneers!” was published and, by then, she surely knew that she would have to part with the woman who, to our knowledge, was the one great love of her life, Isabelle McClung, who indeed, three years later, married a violinist.

This beautiful book—like a memory, almost, rather than a representation—just had its hundredth birthday. May it live forever.

Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty.
