Willa Cather and Me

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 9 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Back when I wrote my first Willa Cather blog entry, my fingers speed-typed:  “If you’re looking for a Cather surrogate in O Pioneers!, you might consider Carl Anderson…”

Then I had to go back and correct the line because I typed it wrong.  It’s Carl Linstrum, not Carl Anderson. So I retyped Linstrum and continued on. Next time, same thing happened. I typed Carl Anderson again. You see, Linstrum isn’t natural for me. Carl ANDERSON is very natural. My brain auto-corrects to it.

My grandfather Theodore Carl Anderson.

It must be the Swedish side of me that takes over. My mother was an Anderson, my grandfather was Theodore Carl Anderson, and my great-grandfather was Carl Anderson. (Plus, my uncle and a cousin are Theodore Carl Andersons, too!)

My Anderson ancestors would have immigrated to America about a generation after the family of the fictional Carl Linstrum. While O Pioneers! doesn’t specifically describe Carl’s background, he seems to be a first-generation Swedish-American, born to recently arrived immigrants who immediately traveled west to this small Swedish community in Nebraska. My ancestors didn’t go that far. Carl Anderson never left the Atlantic coastal region after his boat arrived. He and his wife eventually settled in Connecticut.

I can identify with Carl Linstrum, picturing him not much different from my grandfather. I could easily imagine my grandfather as a young man climbing a telegraph pole to rescue a kitten for a little boy. He was always happy to help others.

There’s another personal connection that I enjoy with Willa Cather. While she wrote far more about Nebraska, Cather’s first ten years were spent near the idyllic Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. That’s my land! I have deep roots there.  The Blue Ridge Mountains were home to my grandmother—the woman who married that first-generation Swedish-American Theodore Carl Anderson. My grandmother grew up in Luray, Virginia, just 60 miles south of Cather’s birthplace in Gore, Virginia, near Winchester. Both my grandmother and Cather retained a lifelong love of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Cather frequently shared about her resentment at being dragged off to that depressing flat prairie land of Nebraska.

Cather came to terms with Nebraska through her fiction, but if you ever get the feeling that Nebraska is a compromise substitute for her original love, it’s because her heart belonged to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I can connect with that.

Our family vacationed in the Blue Ridge Mountains last year.
This shot was taken in Shenandoah National Park
looking down on the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

10 Things I Love About Willa Cather's O Pioneers

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 8 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Ten Reasons to Embrace This Book...

A Top 10 List (in no particular order)

1.  Alexandra gets the farm!  How cool is that?  (This deathbed decision by Alexandra’s father is extremely unusual for its time.  John Bergson is a wise man.)

John Bergson says:  “Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.  She will do the best she can.  If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have made…  And you will be guided by your sister, boys…”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter II

2.  But Alexandra remains humble despite her success, crediting all she has achieved to the Genius of the land.

Alexandra says:  “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl.  The land did it.  It had its little joke.  It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself.  It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter IV

3.  Beneath her no-nonsense attitude, there’s passion inside Alexandra.  (Note:  This is my favorite sentence in the book.)

Alexandra says to Carl:  “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter XI

4.  Willa Cather takes the O Pioneers! title from a Walt Whitman poem and then closes her novel with a beautiful paraphrase of a key verse from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:  “…what do you think has become of the women and children? / They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death …”  (Whitman).

“Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part V, Chapter III

5.  Cather loves her literary allusions.  In the book, Marie’s orchard sparkles with references to the Bower of Bliss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, the mulberry tree in the Pyramus and Thisbee legend, and the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

Marie says to Emil:  “I’ll call you if I see a snake.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter VIII

6.  And Cather can get down-and-dirty raunchy, too.  I think Cather was entirely aware of the implications behind her word choices when she wrote the following:

Marie says:  “I wish I had an athlete to mow my orchard.  I get wet to my knees when I go down to pick cherries.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter I

7.  When horror enters this world, Cather doesn’t flinch.  (Cather’s one scene of horror reminds me of a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) where Hitch intentionally went to lengths to show how hard it can be to kill someone.  Death is horrifically painful in O Pioneers!)

 “… in a white patch of light, where the moon shone through the branches, a man’s hand was plucking spasmodically at the grass.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part IV, Chapter VII

8.  Okay, let’s lighten up.  Food is important, too, with the ethnic groups maintaining some of their old traditions.

“Marie took out a pan of delicate little rolls, stuffed with stewed apricots, and began to dust them over with powdered sugar… ‘The Bohemians,’ said Alexandra, as they drew up to the table, ‘certainly know how to make more kinds of bread than any other people in the world. Old Mrs. Hiller told me once at the church supper that she could make seven kinds of fancy bread, but Marie could make a dozen.’ ”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part III, Chapter I

9.  The old ways are respected, allowing for glimpses into the rapidly disappearing Old World traditions of various immigrant communities.

Concerning Mrs. Bergson:  “She knew long portions of the ‘Frithjof Saga’ by heart, and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow’s verse…  To-day she sat in the wooden rocking-chair with the Swedish Bible open on her knees, but she was not reading.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter IV

and concerning the Bohemians:  “Three big Bohemians were drinking raw alcohol, tinctured with oil of cinnamon.  This was said to fortify one effectually against the cold, and they smacked their lips after each pull at the flask.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter I

10.  And the melancholy sense that even as Alexandra and the surrounding community succeed in harnessing the land’s power, something spiritual is being lost in the process of assimilation.  It’s the passing of an age.

Ivar says:  “At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward.  We thought nothing of it, and let them alone.  But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in an asylum.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter II

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Alexandra Bergson and the Girl with the White Parasol

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 7 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember.”

                                          Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein

                                          Citizen Kane (1941)

I’m watching a scene from Citizen Kane, one of the world’s greatest movies, and thinking about O Pioneers! Midway through their stories, both the Orson Welles’ movie and the Willa Cather book pause for a grace moment—the first a story told across a large office desk and the other a memory on the windy plains of Nebraska. Neither scene is essential to the plot but each lingers in the mind long afterward.

Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane’s loyal business manager, explains to the reporter Thompson that surprising things can stick in a person’s head:

“You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Roll the film:

It’s a sublime scene, sensitively acted by Everett Sloane and evocatively written by Herman Mankiewicz. Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland shoot it straight, with just a slow dolly toward Sloane as he reminisces.

In O Pioneers!, our heroine Alexandra Bergson recalls a similar memory. It comes in the book’s third part, “Winter Memories,” dealing with a lonely time when Alexandra is feeling abandoned, missing the presence of her brother Emil and her friend Carl. She thinks back to a day when she and Emil shared a special moment by the river.  It involved a duck.

“When Emil said he was he was hungry, they drew back from the road, gave Brigham his oats among the bushes, and climbed up to the top of a grassy bluff to eat their lunch under the shade of some little elm trees. The river was clear there, and shallow, since there had been no rain, and it ran in ripples over the sparkling sand. 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 very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck.”

The wild duck is Cather’s feathered version of the girl with the white parasol. Like the girl, the duck is oblivious to the moment and the person observing her. Here’s the clincher line, where Alexandra sounds like Mr. Bernstein behind his desk, recalling a privileged moment of unexpected beauty:

“Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.”

You might not notice these scenes on first encounter. Not much really happens. But they’re the type of scene that can echo in the midnight hours, when you involuntarily recall a distant memory shared by no one else in the world—your own personal girl with a white parasol or your own wild duck.

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Marie's Eyes in O Pioneers!

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 6 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
SPOILERS AHEAD!

I think it’s the most vivid descriptive detail in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!:  Marie’s eyes glint like the gemstone tiger’s eye.

“Every one noticed her eyes;  the brown iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter I

This description comes from a passage reflecting the point of view of Alexandra Bergson, the book’s heroine.  Later in the book, Cather returns to the subject of Marie’s eyes, this time through the perspective of Alexandra’s friend Carl Linstrum.

Champagne image by
Jon Sullivan at pdphoto.org

“Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky’s eyes, and he was glad to have an opportunity to study them.  The brown iris, he found, was curiously slashed with yellow, the color of sunflower honey, or of old amber.  In each eye one of these streaks must have been larger than the others, for the effect was that of two dancing points of light, two little yellow bubbles, such as rise in a glass of champagne.”

                           O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

                           Part II, Chapter VI

That slash of yellow suggests a cat’s eye, or maybe a tiger’s eye.

It’s the two artists, Alexandra and Carl, who notice Marie’s eyes.  Alexandra is an artist of the land just as Carl is an artist and craftsman, albeit an unsuccessful one.  Curiously, Marie’s lovers—Frank Shabata and Emil—are never given equivalent opportunities to pay respect to Marie’s fascinating eyes.

There are two significant mentions of Marie’s eyes during her scenes with Emil.  When Marie teases him at the graveyard in Part II, “her dancing yellow-brown eyes bubbled with gayety.”  (Notice how that description is later echoed in the mention of champagne in Carl’s passage, quoted above.)  Then in the final Marie-Emil scene when he comes to her in the orchard, she is lying on her side under the white mulberry tree and “her amber eyes opened slowly.”  Somewhat unobservant up to this point, Emil looks deep into her eyes this time:   “…in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun.”

When Ivar finds their bodies the next morning, Marie’s eyes are lightly closed, “as if in a day-dream or a light slumber.”  And this echoes Marie’s last words in the book, spoken as she awakens and Emil peers into her eyes:  “ ‘I was dreaming this,’ she whispered, hiding her face against him, ‘don’t take my dream away!’ ”

Willa Cather’s word choices are beautiful;  her subtle repetitions and echoes are exquisite.  While nothing is over-stressed, the total effect becomes almost symphonic as the imagery and themes crescendo toward the emotionally devastating conclusion.  This is the work of a master writer, confidently in control of her art.

"...her amber eyes opened slowly."
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien
Willa Cather by Philip Gerber

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Casting Call for O Pioneers!

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 5 on
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Here’s the set-up:  Interior of a small cabin on the Nebraska prairie.  Lying in his bed, John Bergson, the father of our heroine Alexandra Bergson, is dying.  A recent immigrant, John Bergson remains very Swedish.  His teenage daughter Alexandra stands by his bedside.  She has a will of iron.

Casting call!

Cork Ramer as John Bergson and Heather Graham as young Alexandra
in the 1992 Hallmark production of O Pioneers!

John Qualen in The Searchers.

As a classic film buff, I can’t help picturing this early scene in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! as a John Ford movie scene.  I see John Qualen as the dying father and Maureen O’Hara as Alexandra (yes, I know O’Hara is Irish but she’s got the right personality).   Alexandra’s two bone-headed brothers could grow up to be Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen.  And then I’ll round out the picture with Henry Fonda as Carl Linstrum, Natalie Wood as Marie, and Harry Carey Jr. as Emil.

Maureen O'Hara in
The Quiet Man.

Yeah, I realize there are problems galore with age and ethnicity in the above casting.  Not to mention John Ford’s inevitable problems with Willa Cather’s strong women dominating the weak men.  There’s no role for John Wayne in a Willa Cather story.  And what if Ford insisted on filming it in Monument Valley rather than Nebraska?  Truthfully, my real choice for a director from Hollywood’s golden age might be Jean Renoir, who proved his feel for landscape in movies like The Southerner (1946) and The River (1951).  And for my Renoir-directed O Pioneers!, I think I’ll take Ingrid Bergman as Alexandra.

Liv Ullmann in The Emigrants.

Jumping ahead thirty years to the 1970s, I see only one choice for Alexandra:  Liv Ullmann.  She would have been perfect.  For a supporting cast, how about Genevieve Bujold as Marie, Jeff Bridges as Emil, and Alan Arkin as Carl?  And for a 70s director, I propose Peter Bogdanovich, who showed a real flair for heartland dramas in his early days.  Seriously, imagine O Pioneers! with the feel for place that Bogdanovich brought to The Last Picture Show (1971) and the period details of Paper Moon (1973).

To date, there’s only been one film of O Pioneers! and that’s the Hallmark Production of 1992.  The casting was superb.  Jessica Lange had the right inner strength for Alexandra, David Strathairn handled the gentleness and humility of Carl with just the right amount of charm, and Anne Heche made a bewitching Marie, flirty and tantalizing.  The period details were exquisite and much wonderful dialogue was pulled straight from the book.  Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s the final word on the subject.  For me, it’s not the definitive O Pioneers!

I think there’s a better movie yet to be made.  Any ideas for casting?

Jessica Lange as Alexandra in the 1992
Hallmark production of O Pioneers!

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien
Willa Cather by Philip Gerber

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Willa Cather's Hobbit Hole

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 4 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything.  It should be of the hill.  Belonging to it.  Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”

                      Frank Lloyd Wright

                      An Autobiography (1932)

Sod houses are looked down upon in Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!  As Cather writes, “The Bergsons had a log house, for instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.”  (Note:  Mrs. Bergson is our heroine Alexandra’s mother.)

But sod houses aren’t all bad.  The very sympathetic character Ivar lives in a sod house, and it seems a perfectly appropriate place for his barefoot, mystical personality.  It’s just not the sort of place that’s wanted in the newly emerging domesticated landscape of plowed farmland and respectable farmhouses.

Ivar runs back to his sod house in
the Hallmark production of O Pioneers! (1992).

Early in the novel, Alexandra, her three brothers, and her friend Carl Linstrum travel out to see Ivar.  Alexandra points out Ivar’s property and sod house to her youngest brother Emil.

“At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside.  You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass.  And that was all you saw.  Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass.  But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation.  Ivan had lived for three years in the clay bank…”

I wonder if Frank Lloyd Wright would approve?  Ivar’s house is certainly “of the hill,” prairie-style!

My daughter at the entrance of a
reproduction sod house at the
Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in
Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

Reading the passage about Ivar’s house, I recalled our family’s Laura Ingalls Wilder vacation, when we spent two weeks touring the Midwest in search of the Little House sites.  In Walnut Grove, Minnesota, we visited the place that Wilder knew as Plum Creek.  Her fictionalized memories of her life in a sod house on Plum Creek are captured in the first third of On the Banks of Plum Creek (the third book in the Little House series).  She would have been seven or eight at the time.  In the book’s second chapter “The House in the Ground,” she recalls how her family adjusted to life in their new sod house:

“That front wall was built of sod.  Mr. Hanson had dug out his house, and then he had cut long strips of prairie sod and laid them on top of one another, to make the front wall.  It was a good, thick wall with not one crack in it.  No cold could get through that wall.

“Ma was pleased.  She said, ‘It’s small, but it’s clean and pleasant.’ ”

Except for the time when an ox put his rear leg through the roof, the Ingalls’ time in their sod house is fairly idyllic.  Nevertheless, they’re all happy when Pa begins building a log house for them.  It’s a step up.

But what’s wrong with the humble nature of a sod house, barely visible in a hill?  It’s good enough for Bilbo Baggins, after all!

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat:  it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

                                                                                      The Hobbit

                                                                                      by J.R.R. Tolkien

A wizard and hobbit travel past a traditional hobbit hole in
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring  (2001).

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

A Gun-Free Zone

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 3 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
SPOILERS AHEAD!

“You love God as much as the one you love the least.”

                    Father John Hugo

                    Weapons of the Spirit

Jessica Lange as Alexandra Bergson forgives her brother's murderer
in the 1992 Hallmark production of O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.

With my wife and daughter out for the night at a revival of Les Mis, I’m home alone thinking about forgiveness and redemption on the plains of Nebraska.

Just as the plot of Les Miserables pivots on an act of mercy, the final section of O Pioneers! hinges on an intentional act of deeply-felt forgiveness.  In Part V, Chapter II, our heroine Alexandra travels to the prison to see Frank Shabata, the man who murdered her brother Emil:

“Alexandra held out her hand. ‘Frank,’ she said, her eyes filling suddenly, ‘I hope you’ll let me be friendly with you.  I understand how you did it.  I don’t feel hard toward you…’ ”

Alexandra not only forgives Frank for the double murder of Emil and Maria (Frank’s wife) but pledges her continued efforts to get him pardoned.  “I’ll never give the Governor any peace,” she tells him.  “I know I can get you out of this place.”

As Frank is undeniably guilty of two murders and therefore serving a just sentence, this act of Alexandra’s is one of complete and unearned mercy.  It is a freely given gift.  In return, Alexandra’s own life is transformed.  While there’s no direct causal relation, the narrative clearly makes the link.  Since the murders, Alexandra has lost all sense of purpose, falling into a deep depression.  She forgives Frank, returns to her hotel, and receives a telegram that Carl Linstrum is returning to her.  She bursts into tears as her life recovers meaning.

Her act of mercy may save Frank’s life.  And it appears to save her own life, as well.

Leigh Lawson as Frank Shabata in O Pioneers! (1992).

Alexandra accepts Frank’s tortured description of the murder (a description which mirrors the more objective murder passage in Part III).  Frank blames the gun.  He says, “An’ I ain’t never hurt her (Maria).  I never would-a done dat, if I ain’t had dat gun along.  I don’ know what in hell make me take dat gun.  She always say I ain’t no man to carry gun…”

O Pioneers! is a deeply anti-gun book.  The book’s most sympathetic characters—Alexandra, Carl Linstrum, and Ivar—want nothing to do with guns.  In contrast, Alexandra’s unsympathetic brothers celebrate their guns, Alexandra’s brother Emil deeply offends Maria by shooting a bird for her, and Frank’s experience with a gun proves disastrous.  I think it’s pretty clear that Willa Cather stands with the mystical Ivar.  “No guns, no guns!” Ivar shouts in his first appearance in the book, threatening to send a wagon of visitors back if any of them are armed.  Ivar’s land is a gun-free zone.

Now I don’t believe in making real-life arguments from fiction.  I’m not going there.  I’m just simply pointing out that a hundred years ago, Willa Cather—a pure product of Virginia and Nebraska—eloquently expressed her belief that guns were at the root of much violence in this world.  She loved the pioneers and their wild prairie world, but not their guns.

An image of mercy:  Jessica Lange as Alexandra Bergson
in O Pioneers! (1992).

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien
Willa Cather by Philip Gerber

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

A Tallgrass Prairie

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 2 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening…  The roads were but faint tracks in the grass and the fields were scarcely noticeable.  The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.”

Part I (The Wild Land), Chapter II

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Prairie as far as the eye can see:
My children on vacation at
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

Several years ago, my family and I took the 90-minute ranger-led prairie bus tour of  Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, Kansas.  It was my destination request.  I wanted to get an idea of what America’s vast plains looked like before European settlement.  The 10,894 acres of Tallgrass Prairie offer one of the few available approximations of a landscape that once stretched out across the American Midwest, seemingly forever.

The O Pioneers! description above describes the prairie before it was tamed into farmland.  Even though John Bergson (father of heroine Alexandra Bergson) has spent 11 years working the land at this point, his work has barely changed its appearance.  Over a subsequent 16 years, Alexandra marshals her feel for the land and new agricultural  resources to create the farmland that we now associate with the Midwest.

In Part II (Neighboring Fields) of O Pioneers!, Alexandra gives the land credit for the transformation that has made her wealthy:  “The land did it.  It had its little joke.  It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right;  and then, all at once, it worked itself.  It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.”

Driving around the Midwest, you can see the land that determined people like Alexandra nurtured into being.  These days, it takes work to ferret out the rare places like Tallgrass Prairie that offer a suggestion of what the land might have looked like in 1883.  The National Park Service has been thoughtfully developing Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve since 1996.  The tour bus takes tourists like my family out into the middle of the prairie which stretches out flat and quiet all around you.  From a distance, it all looks the same;  close up, you start seeing variety.

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve
in Chase County, Kansas.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to a beautiful day and a knowledgeable ranger guide, the prairie didn’t feel depressing and disheartening at all on our visit.  My memories are of a sublime beauty, albeit a little frightening in its sheer scale, gazing across miles of seemingly unbroken grassland to the distant horizon.  If you were abandoned here, no one would ever know.  You feel small. But looking down at the ground, you see that the unending acreage is speckled with life.  Hundreds of plant species live on a healthy prairie, along with a wide variety of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.  While it all looks level and dry at first, creeks meander through the tall grass, creating mini-ecosystems within the broader prairie.

This isn’t the precise world that is described in the early chapters of O Pioneers!  Cather based her novel on memories of the land around Red Cloud, Nebraska, approximately 150 miles northwest of Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.  Elevation can make a big difference in the ecology of the prairie.  Tallgrass Prairie is only about 1,200 feet above sea level while at 1,700 feet, Red Cloud is really more of the tabletop described by Cather in the opening sentence of the book.

Maybe Tallgrass Prairie is more representative of the low-lying river farms that Alexandra visits in the concluding chapter of Part I of O Pioneers!  Alexandra decides that their Nebraska land is better than the farmland of the low-lying valleys and resolves to stay planted on her father’s rough and windy tabletop land.

I haven’t visited the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, managed by the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska.  Here the Foundation preserves a 608-acre tract of native prairie, untouched by plow.  Red Cloud is the town where Willa Cather spent much of her youth.  This may be as close as we can now get to the prairie land that Cather first saw when she arrived in Nebraska in 1883, an experience deeply reflected in the descriptions in the first part of O Pioneers!

We’re lucky to have these isolated places where you can still squint your eyes on a windy prairie, remember Cather’s words, and imagine life on the prairie, circa 1883.

Historical markers at Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, located on the
west side of U.S. Highway 28 just north of the Nebraska-Kansas
border in southern Webster County, Nebraska.
Photo by Ammodramus.  Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 1 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.”

Part I (The Wild Land), Chapter I

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Dover Thrift Edition of O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather, available at
Amazon and other booksellers.

The setting:  The fictional town of Hanover is located a short distance north of the Nebraska-Kansas border, about midway across the state (southwest of the city of Lincoln, Nebraska).  The time:  O Pioneers! was published in 1913, so thirty years previous places us approximately in 1883.

Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! is all about the land on that windy tabletop setting.  There are three types of characters in this challenging landscape:  those who fight the land, those who learn to co-exist with the land, and those who leave.

At first glance, you might think Willa Cather and I have little common ground to stand on.  Her strongest characters—like Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!—place their faith in the soil.  While her neighbors fail in their attempts to force the land into shape, Alexandra succeeds because she believes in working with the land rather than against it.  Others fight the land and fail;  Alexandra’s approach is that of a steward.

I don’t fall into either camp.  I neither fight the land (of our little suburban yard) nor steward it, resolutely immune to the joys of farming, gardening, and even basic lawn care.  To the greatest degree possible, I simply ignore our land.  That’s not an attitude you find much in Willa Cather where so much depends upon one’s relationship with the land.  You might think she’d disapprove of me.

But Willa Cather isn’t Alexandra, her land-loving heroine.  Cather was one of those who left.  If you're looking for a Cather surrogate in O Pioneers!, you might consider Carl Linstrum, the ineffectual artist who returns to the prairie but remains apart from it.  With one unsuccessful novel behind her, Cather was hardly a blazing success when she returned to her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska to take notes in preparation for her second novel.  She was an outsider with an uncertain future.

Portrait of Willa Cather.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten.
Van Vechten Collection,
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Cather naturally gravitated toward universities and cities.  She was the type of person whom Alexandra’s brothers Oscar and Lou would have detested, similar to the way they strongly disapprove of the academic pretensions of Carl Linstrum and their own brother Emil.  It’s that deep-rooted American distrust of the intellectual that still flourishes today.  Cather’s too honest not to show it.  She must have felt it herself when she returned to Nebraska, taking notes for her books.

Truthfully, I think Willa Cather and I would have gotten along just fine.  Confronted with the real-life practicality of an Alexandra Bergson, she’d probably be bored to tears.  But I could see Cather and I discussing our shared fantasies of loving the land for hours, drinking coffee in a city café far from the brutal environments that we idealize.

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price