O Pioneers! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I - The Wild Land

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  PART II - NeighboringFields

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  PART III - Winter Memories

  I

  II

  PART IV - The White Mulberry Tree

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  PART V - Alexandra

  I

  II

  III

  SIGNET CLASSICS

  READ THE TOP 20 SIGNET CLASSICS

  Born in Virginia, Willa Cather (1873-1948) moved with her family to Nebraska before she was ten. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895, then taught high school and worked for the Pittsburgh Leader before being appointed associate editor of McClure’s magazine. Cather published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. With O Pioneers! (1913), she turned to her greatest subject, immigrant life on the Nebraska prairies, and established herself as a major American novelist. O Pioneers! was followed by more novels, including My Àntonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

  Marcelle Clements is a novelist and journalist who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, and politics to many national publications. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, The Dog Is Us and The Improvised Woman, and the novels Rock Me and Midsummer.

  SIGNET CLASSIC

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  Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Signet Classic Printing, January 1989 First Signet Classic Printing (Clements Introduction), January

  Introduction copyright © Marcelle Clements, 2004 All rights reserved

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  To the memory of

  SARAH ORNE JEWETT

  in whose beautiful and delicate work

  there is the perfection

  that endures

  INTRODUCTION

  Art is not thought or emotion, but expression, expression, always expression. To keep an idea living, intact, tinged with all its original feeling, its original mood, preserving in it all the ecstasy which attended its birth, to keep it so all the way from the brain to the hand and transfer it on paper a living thing with color, odor, sound, life all in it, that is what art means, that is the greatest of all the gifts of the gods. And that is the voyage perilous. . . .1

  Writing a novel always seems like a perilous voyage. What is at stake, just to start with, is the writer’s sense of self. But for Willa Cather, O Pioneers! was an especially hazardous journey, because it took her back to Nebraska, a place she had worked terribly hard to escape and had never wanted to go to in the first place. Indeed, when she had first traveled there, at age nine, the vast, empty prairie struck her “like a kind of erasure.”2

  In O Pioneers!, the struggle she must have engaged in to stay psychologically alive when she moved to Nebraska with her family is everywhere in evidence. Nothing takes root easily: “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away” is how the novel begins. None of the homes, she tells us, “had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.”

  Willa Cather was born in 1873 in Virginia, where her family had lived since Colonial times; she spent her early years in a lovely, bustling household, a place called Willow Shade. When she was nine, her father’s sheep barn burned down and he moved his family to Nebraska, where his father, one brother and three sisters had preceded him. Accompanying them were a maternal grandmother and several cousins and neighbors. The farm and its equipment and its remaining livestock were auctioned off and even the favorite sheepdog, Old Vic, was left behind with a neighbor. Cather’s biographer, James Woodress, writes: “Willa Cather remembered poignantly Old Vic on the day of their departure. Just as the family was about to board the train at Back Creek, the old dog broke loose and came running across the fields dragging his chain.”3 America was experiencing the birth of a protean movement, the very beginning of the great westward displacement of the late-nineteenth century; for Willa it was a devastating loss, which would provide the future author with both inexhaustible subject matter and lifelong sorrow.

  In April 1883, when the family arrived on the Great Plains, the region surrounding the Webster County depot at Red Cloud was barely settled—the railroad had come in less than fifteen years earlier. In the twenty-first century we are thoroughly indoctrinated to find wilderness beautiful and inviting (at least in fantasy), but for the girl from Willow Shade, Virginia, it was an annihilating experience to be “jerked away” from her native hills and meadows and “thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.” Thirty years later, Cather would recall driving from Red Cloud to her grandfather’s homestead:I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on the side of the wagon box to steady myself—the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality.... [A]nd I would have got on pretty well during that ride if it had not been for the larks. Every now and then one flew up and sang a few splendid notes and dropped down into the grass again. That reminded me of something—I don’t know what, but my one purpose in life just then was not to cry, and every time they did it, I thought I would go under.“4

  On her grandfather’s homestead and later in Red Cloud, the prairie town where her father opened a real estate and loan office, Cather seemed to have adapted to her new culture, adopting the widest possible spectrum of connections. She loved to listen to the talk of the local farmers and their wives—Swedes, Germans, Russians, French and Bohemians. She also made friends with every eccentric, learned European who happened to have gotten himself marooned in Red Cloud. William Ducker, an English storekeeper, taught her Greek and Latin and they read Virgil, Ov
id and Homer together. With the Wieners, her French- and German-speaking neighbors, she discovered European classics in translation. At home, her grandmother’s favorites were the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress and Peter Parley’s Universal History. Her mother, many of whose energies were consumed by illness, pregnancies, births and miscarriages, preferred popular novelists such as Ouida and Marie Corelli. As for Willa, she read indiscriminately and insatiably: Shakespeare, George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle and every manner of romantic fiction. Her piano teacher informed her mother that she was wasting her money, but her mother asked him to continue his sessions with Willa, who seemed to be profiting from the long talks they had afterward. Willa participated in amateur theatricals. At age thirteen, she cut off all her hair, took to wearing boys’ clothing and signing her letters William Cather, M.D., because, she said, she wanted to become a surgeon. She developed an intense interest in dissection and vivisection—to the horror of some of her schoolmates and their parents. At last she graduated from Red Cloud High School (in a class of three) and delivered a speech titled “Superstition Versus Investigation,” in which she defended scientific inquiry but plainly intended to justify her experiments in dissection. The speech was greeted with notable tepidity by many of the disapproving neighbors in attendance.

  Then came her escape from Red Cloud to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where, some six months later, her English instructor secretly submitted her essay “Concerning Thos. Carlyle” to the Nebraska State Journal, which accepted it. From there, her trajectory would be straightforward, arduous but obstinate. Cather contributed hundreds of pieces to student publications and local papers—stories, poems, essays, articles and theater reviews increasingly notorious for their “meat-ax” rebukes of touring actors.

  When she finished at the university and returned to Red Cloud, she continued writing for some of these publications but nevertheless found life back in the prairie town intolerably boring. She began her letters by locating herself in “Siberia.” In 1896, aged twenty-three, she left Red Cloud at last for Pittsburgh, for a job as editor of Home Monthly, a women’s magazine. With the exception of a short interval during which she taught at a Pittsburgh high school, following which she moved to New York and McClure’s magazine, Cather would spend the next decade and a half devoting herself to journeyman journalism, both as an editor and as the writer of literally thousands of pieces on the arts, as well as to ghostwriting several books, traveling widely in this country and in Europe and making friends everywhere of writers, artists and musicians.

  This professional and social whirlwind came to an end with the publication of her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge—the culmination and, in many ways, the embodiment of the last decade and a half. The story centered on a sophisticated man’s journey from Boston to London. Cather adorned the work with the deeply intelligent analysis and witty aperçus that came easily to her after years of attention to technique and because of her great admiration for Henry James. The novel was variously praised or repudiated for being “Jamesian” but Cather herself recoiled from it almost immediately.

  At last she heeded the words of her friend Sarah Orne Jewett, whose The Country of the Pointed Firs she had profoundly admired. Jewett had warned that if Cather did not stop working so hard at her journalism, she would not be able to progress with her fiction. Cather left off work altogether and went to Arizona, then to New Mexico, just to think. The more time she spent there, “the more unnecessary and superficial a book like Alexander’s Bridge seemed to me,” she said of this transition in an essay titled “My First Novels (and there were two).”5 The brutally cleansing self-examination she must have conducted is something we can only guess at, because all she says is: “I did no writing down there, but I recovered from the conventional editorial point of view.”

  She caused herself to recover from the idea that the drawing room was “the only proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart or clever people.... Henry James and Mrs. Wharton were our most interesting novelists, and most of the younger writers followed their manner, without having their qualifications.”

  When she finally returned to work, it was to use recollections of her Scandinavian and Bohemian neighbors in Nebraska in some stories. Soon she had the idea of joining two such tales together to form the basis of O Pioneers!, which she set to writing in earnest in a new way: [A] different process altogether. Here there was no arranging or “inventing”; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. The other was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time.6

  The title of O Pioneers! is an homage to Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name. Although Willa Cather has often been praised (sometimes overpraised, to the detriment of her reputation) for her own poetic paean to the American land, she was often dismissed or, worse, patronized by the young critics of her time for being a provincial, an escapist or a naif. But what is particularly fascinating about Cather’s return to Red Cloud and the surrounding countryside for her material, and what she is only beginning to be given credit for, is that her view of this material was extraordinarily enriched by her years of reading and thinking, by her exposure to the ideas and the creative work of every American artist who was doing anything interesting at all during the years she spent covering culture, and by the great literature and art of Europe, in particular France. From all these sources, combined with the powerful experience of her own history, she extrapolated and synthesized an aesthetic that informs every word of the deceptively “simple” stories and novels.

  O Pioneers! deserves to be read by everyone who, like Cather, needs to recover from “the conventional editorial point of view,” and the truth is that this probably includes all of us. A century after the novel was written, it still works like an antidote when we are feeling sick from the implacable too-much of our culture—too much distortion, too much reification, too much hype, too many words, too much alienation and too much sentiment, too many things, too many crowds, too little time and nearly no timelessness at all.

  Its heroine, Alexandra Bergson, still seems as original and eloquent as ever, and she can still persuade us, even those of us who could not imagine leaving the city for anything more than a vacation, of the value of honoring one’s place in nature. And Cather tells us, quite deliberately and pointedly, that Alexandra, however fetching she may have been, was never clever or witty and had no place or interest in a drawing room. We meet her as a child who needs to act like an adult: “a tall, strong girl . . . she walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next” (p. 5). By the end of the novel, we are loath to say good-bye to her. Her brothers, her friends and her neighbors, their dramas, their comedy, their wisdom and their tragic mistakes still move us as we watch them discover their destinies in the unbounded and desolate beauty that surrounds them.

  This is the other element of Willa Cather’s writing with which she has been insufficiently credited—it is no mere description that evokes our vivid sense of the beauty of the land. On the contrary, it is the mingling of the sweetness and the drama of nature with the sorrow it causes, the combination of the thrilling cycling and recycling of the earth with the harshness of the reality of the characters, their follies and their pragmatism. In Cather’s world, the Swedish and Bohemian and French farmers are not beautiful savages ennobled by the land. They are alternately petty, conniving, charming, sadistic, conventional, dangerously wounded, uncomprehending and transcendent.

  After OPioneers!, Willa Cather went on to wrote other novels set in Nebraska, most notably My Àntonia, and then moved on to One of Ours (which won the Pulitzer Prize), A Lost Lady and Death Comes to the Archbishop, among others. She wrote twelve novels altogether and also continued to write many short stories and what would have seemed to anyone e
lse to be a very hefty number of critical essays, though she never returned to periodic journalism. Some of her books were praised by the critics and sold poorly; others sold well and were excoriated by the young lions who deemed her too feminine or too old or too pastoral for their taste. She was deeply wounded by their rejection and for years would invoke the review of O Pioneers! in which a now forgotten critic declared, “I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it.”7

  Willa Cather always had ardent defenders among her fellow writers—including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald and Faulkner—and fortunately, in the past several decades, many critics and writers have demonstrated that they, on the contrary, do give a damn. Cather scholarship has flourished to such an extent that controversies regarding Cather’s sexuality have overflowed onto the pages of general interest magazines—and very interesting controversies they are too, although they would undoubtedly have tormented Cather, who became increasingly private as time went on, forbade the publication of her letters, refused to allow her books to be made into movies and essentially retreated from the journalistic marketplace of ideas in which she had formerly so productively participated. She was not a comfortable woman.

  What remained was her belief in art, and whatever discomfort it may have caused her or us, Cather stayed true to the revelation of the Arizona countryside and remained unwaveringly faithful to this religion. In the end, even nature was subsidiary—sex certainly was—as was her obvious tenderness for those characters she remembered and re-created in her books. For all that she has routinely been cast as an earth mother/singer of the song of either nature or immigration, Cather laces her work with a piercingly painful evocation of the loneliness of the wild, unfriendly land and the resulting violence and ambiguity in the relationships of those who live there. It has often been said that the land is a character in O Pioneers!, but so too is the homesickness of the immigrants for some other land. Some of her characters are so homesick that they kill themselves. What makes this book so stirring is the alternation—the dance of the joyful and the painful, the petty and the sublime—and also, underlying the quaint charm of the old rustic scenes, the disturbing, unmistakable glimmering of psychological truth: the unnamed, complex emotional states of the characters and, therefore, of the readers who are observing them.