Willa Cather's America

The days are getting shorter. The leaves are turning. Friday night lights are glowing again.

And, my summer reading is winding down. This summer, I've been making an effort to read many of the classics that I've avoided in the past: Nabokov, DH Lawrence, and Jane Austen among them.

But, I've saved the best for last.

I've been hearing about Willa Cather, the poet laureate of the American prairie, since high school. But, her name was always found in sentences with words like farmers, pioneers, and Nebraska, and I shied away from the books themselves . . .

. . . Until a couple of years ago when I included Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours in a series I was doing about women novelists and World War I. The novel was about farmers and Nebraska and the Great War, and I enjoyed it immensely. I decided then and there to find time to read more Cather. My review of One of Ours is here: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,88609,00.html

I finally got back to Cather this August. I started with O Pioneers and proceeded to My Antonia. Both are bittersweet masterpieces. And, yes, they revolve around the farmers—male and female, especially female—who struggled against long odds to tame the Nebraska frontier. But, that's like saying Moby Dick is about a whale hunt.

Cather's heroes and heroines also are universal reflections of the indomitable human spirit that drives human progress. More than any other American novelist, Cather captures the essential ingredients of the American success story pre-1945: risk-taking, sacrifice, hard work, quiet courage, and self-reliance.

Armed with those attributes, Cather's—and America's—immigrant farmers subdued a vast continent, one frontier after another. Later, when the population tide reversed and streamed from farm to city, the refugees from rural America brought their values to the urban frontier.

The very values that once defined the American character—the values on prominent display in Cather's fiction—are now derided as conservative in many circles and have become seriously frayed in the last half-century. The $64,000 question is whether an American character that is increasingly dependent on government, risk-averse, and quick to claim victimhood is ready for primetime in the 21st Century?

Quotable: My Antonia

"Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use."

"When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting."

"'Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they're in love with somebody.'"

"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

"His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct."

Quotable: O Pioneers!

"Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg . . . and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs to cholera . . . . Time and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children . . . . Now, when he had struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time."

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."

"The trouble with Lou is that he is tricky . . . . Politics being the natural field for such talents, he neglects his farm to attend conventions and to run for county offices."

"'Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as it they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.'"

"'The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.'"It's just as well. I wasn't mature enough for Cather.