Come my tan-faced children

I first read Willa Cather in High School.  My Antonia was the novel; “Paul’s Case,” the short story.  I was underwhelmed.  So underwhelmed in fact that for years I was convinced I did not like Cather.  Janet started reading a lot of her, and I was really amazed at how much she liked her.  Janet finally convinced me to read Death Comes for the Archbishop.  It is amazingly good.  Then I decided that Cather wrote one good novel, but I still didn’t care for her.  Over the last few years I read My Antonia two more times.  By my third reading, I was rather impressed with the novel.  I also read The Professor’s House—despite the very promising title, it was just OK.  But, I figured I should read some more Cather; I just never got around to it.

I am happy to report that O Pioneers! is really quite good.  The thing that intrigues me the most about it, however, is trying to categorize it.  It looks like a novel (it’s around 160 pages in the Library of America volume), but it reads like a short story.  The characters are sketched out quickly and deftly; nobody here has the depth one associates with characters in a novel—instead they are all Studies on a Theme.  The background is similarly quickly sketched.  And the plot of the novel reads like several short story plots interwoven throughout.  Add to that the source of the title: Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Reading that poem after finishing Cather’s book is a rather bracing experience.  The book is an extended version of the poem.  That doesn’t mean the book has the same plot as the poem—the poem has no plot.  The poem captures a spirit.  Cather’s book recaptures exactly that same spirit in a different medium.

Consider:

     See my children, resolute children,

By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,

Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,       
      Pioneers! O pioneers!

Or

                 O to die advancing on!

Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?

Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd,
      Pioneers! O pioneers!

Now imagine a story which evokes that same sense of onward progress in the midst of pain and disappointment and death.   Cather’s O Pioneers! isn’t a story per se; the plot details are largely irrelevant; it is the Sense, that Pioneer Attitude, which this book captures.  When finishing it, I was ready to move to the frontier, not because I thought life would be good there—indeed, the book nicely conveys that life is miserable on the frontier—but because the frontier is the right place to be. 

     Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
      Pioneers! O pioneers!

Then I sobered up and remembered I like living in a quiet house and reading books.

6 of 6