O Pioneers!

Willa Cather's novel of life on the prairie, O Pioneers! turns 100 this year. I had never read Cather before, so didn't know what to expect, so I was pleasantly surprised by how this book hasn't really dated that much. The writing is frank and fluid, and life in Nebraska in the late 1800s is presented without sentimentality, but with a touch of heroism.

The novel concerns the Bergson family, Swedish immigrants who farm the Nebraska plains. In the opening chapters, the father dies, having struggled to turn his farm into a success. The land, so fertile today, wasn't easy to farm back in those days--it took modern methods to get the crops to flourish.

The book then jumps ahead some sixteen years, when the daughter, Alexandra, is running the farm. She has not married, but has a strong friendship with a neighbor, Carl. Her two brothers, Lou and Oscar, have farms of their own, and resent that it is Alexandra's efforts that made the farm successful to begin with. The youngest son, Emil, breaks the chain of farmers, and has an adventure in Mexico before coming back home for a spell before he plans on attending law school.

This is not a book necessarily about struggle--there are no scenes of Indian attacks, or locust swarms, or any other disaster that most stories like this include. Instead, it focuses on character, mainly that of Alexandra, Emil, and Marie, a Czech neighbor who has married the pig-headed Frank.  Emil and Marie carry on a flirtation that leads to tragedy, while Alexandra's relationship with Carl ends (at least temporarily) when her brothers chase him off.

Cather is very clear about her opinion of Lou and Oscar, who come off very badly. In addition to dashing Alexandra's hopes of marrying Carl, there is a fiery scene in which they tell her that it was a mistake for her to inherit a third of the farm, as woman shouldn't be in business. She basically tells them to go to hell; her name is on the deed, and it was her innovations that kept them afloat. Alexandra is one of the better heroines of American fiction--she's smart, strong, and has impeccable common sense. Cather says of her: "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."

Of course Cather, who grew up in Nebraska during the time period described, is full of anthropological details about the people who lived there. A few choice observations: "There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon," and "Young farmers seldom address their wives by name. It is always 'you,' or 'she.'"

Beyond this, the writing is just gorgeous. I'll close with this passage that begins Part III, which is beautiful, and a perfect use of the right words and sentence structure: "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."