O Pioneers! - Willa Cather

John Bergson emigrated from Sweden with his family in the 1870s. They settled in Nebraska where there were many other European migrant communities - German, Bohemian, Norwegian. After several tough years farming on The Divide, struggling against poor crops & bad weather, John is dying. He leaves the direction of the farm's future to his daughter, Alexandra, a capable young woman who has the vision that is lacking in her two brothers, Lou & Oscar. We first see Alexandra in the role that will become familiar - taking charge of a situation. She comforts her youngest brother, Emil, when his kitten is chased up a pole outside the general store & asks her friend, Carl Linstrum, to rescue it. She is calm & sensible, dismissive of the admiration of a passer-by & preoccupied by her father's illness. Lou & Oscar are good workers but unimaginative. They agree with their father's last wish, that Alexandra will run the farm. After John's death, there are several hard years but Alexandra is determined to keep the land they have & she convinces her brothers to take out a mortgage to buy more land when other farmers, including their neighbours the Linstrums, are selling out.

Sixteen years later, Alexandra's determination has paid off. She is the owner of a flourishing farm, employing farmhands & training young Swedish girls as servants. Lou & Oscar are married & settled on their own farms with their families. Alexandra is determined to send Emil to college, although Lou & Oscar, unimaginative as ever, can't see the point. Alexandra's neighbour, Marie Shabata, is an attractive, vivacious young woman who married a handsome man who soon turned surly & unpredictable. Her childhood friendship with Emil has continued & she admires Alexandra's calm efficiency at the head of her household.

Alexandra herself has changed very little. Her figure is fuller and she has more color. She seems sunnier and more vigorous than she did as a young girl. But she still has the same calmness and deliberation of manner, the same clear eyes, and she still wears her hair in two braids wound round her head. It is so curly that fiery ends escape from the braids and make her head look like on of the big double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden. Her face is always tanned in summer, for her sunbonnet is oftener on her arm than on her head. But where her collar falls away from her neck, or where her sleeves are pushed back from her wrist, the skin is of such smoothness and whiteness as none but Swedish women ever possess; skin with the freshness of the snow itself.

Alexandra is pleased when Carl Linstrum returns to The Divide after years away. Carl has always cared for her & his visit soothes the loneliness of her life. Lou & Oscar accuse Alexandra of impropriety & think Carl is after Alexandra's money (or, more accurately, their own children's inheritance). This causes a breach between Alexandra & her brothers & Carl leaves to seek his fortune in Alaska without any definite understanding between himself & Alexandra. Emil's love for Marie seems hopeless & he decides to leave as well.

O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's second novel & is considered one of the greatest American regional novels. Cather admired the work of Sarah Orne Jewett (who had encouraged her to write) & her influence is very evident in the glorious descriptions of the natural world & the landscape. Cather grew up in Nebraska &, in the portraits of the farmers & their families, she pays tribute to the women especially that she saw around her. In some ways, O Pioneers! was her true first novel as she later wrote when comparing it to her actual first novel, Alexander's Bridge, about a young engineer & set mostly in London.

... I began to write a book entirely for myself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska, when I was eight or nine years old. I found it a much more absorbing occupation than writing Alexander's Bridge, 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.
(from My First Novels - There Were Two, The Colophon 1931)

O Pioneers! was unusual (it was published in 1913) as the popular novels of the time were the society or drawing room novels of masters like Edith Wharton & Henry James. Willa Cather's greatest novels & stories are set in Nebraska where she grew up & in New Mexico & other places where she travelled in later life. She was carrying on the tradition of writers like Jewett & Mary Wilkins Freeman in focusing on the lives of rural communities, often immigrant communities. Drawing on her childhood memories & the nostalgic affection she felt for the people & the times is one of the strengths of her work.

Alexandra is such a wonderful character. Calm, sensible, intelligent, she dominates the narrative as she dominates her family. She's like a medieval queen or great heiress, providing for her family, caring for her employees & treating them well but finding herself lonely in her lofty position. She also has her charities, from old Ivar, the strange old man who goes barefoot & has strange visions but has a canny common sense when it comes to farming to old Mrs Lee, Lou's mother-in-law, who looks forward all year to her visit to Alexandra where she can wear her comfortable clothes & tell all the old stories from her homeland that her daughter is too sophisticated to care about. Alexandra's competence leaves her feeling isolated & lonely, with only her old friendship with Carl to comfort her. Even Emil expects her to always be there, never changing, while he sets off to Mexico for adventures or is absorbed in his own thoughts of his hopeless love.  

O Pioneers! is a quiet book about determination & perseverance. The big emotions are there although they are hidden under the hard work & social expectations of a tight-knit community. In that same article for The Colophon, Cather writes,

... I did not in the least expect that other people would see anything in a slow-moving story, without "action". without "humor", without a "hero"; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards - set in Nebraska, of all places!

& was surprised when it was published. After her third novel, The Song of the Lark, Cather found herself going back to the direction of O Pioneers! with My Ántonia. Her best-loved novels are these stories about pioneering immigrant families & strong women like Alexandra Bergson & Ántonia Shimerda. Thank goodness she took that direction rather than any other.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather - ed by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

Before Willa Cather died, she did what she could to prevent this book from ever existing. She made a will that clearly forbade all publication of her letters, in full or in part. And now we flagrantly defy Cather's will in the belief that her decision, made in the last, dark years of her life and honored for more than half a century, is outweighed by the value of making these letters available to readers all over the world.

This is how Andrew Jewell & Janis Stout begin their Introduction to this volume of the letters of Willa Cather. My first reaction was to think, Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Then again, if I was going to take the high moral ground, I would have closed the book immediately & returned it to the library the next day. Instead, I read every word & loved it. Jewell & Stout go on to write that Cather may have wanted to prevent the reputation of her work being overshadowed by her private life. She was always careful to protect the two most important emotional relationships of her life, with Isabelle McClung & Edith Lewis, from prying eyes. As it is, very little of Cather's correspondence with either woman survives. In this book of over 600pp, there are only a couple of short notes or postcards to each of them. She also left the ultimate decision about publication in the future to her Executors & Trustee. Jewell & Stout believe that "These lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation." which is certainly true.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1875 & moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska as a child. After attending university in Lincoln, Nebraska, she worked as editor of McClure's magazine in New York, travelled several times to Europe &, more productively for her fiction, to Arizona, New Mexico & Quebec. While working at McClure's, she began publishing her own work & working on the magazine, often filling the pages herself, was a wonderful apprenticeship. She remained close to her parents & her elder brothers, Roscoe & Douglass; girlhood friends such as the Miner sisters; fellow writers, especially Dorothy Canfield Fisher, & her publisher, Alfred Knopf. All these relationships are well-represented in the letters.

Cather's growing reputation led to correspondence with readers & critics which often leads to fascinating stories about the origins of her novels. The friendship with singer Olive Fremstad that was the inspiration for The Song of the Lark; her memories of her immigrant neighbours in Red Cloud that inspired stories like The Bohemian Girl & the novels O Pioneers! & My Àntonia. The trip to New Mexico & her reading about the French Catholic missionaries that became Death Comes for the Archbishop; the childhood memory of a day at her grandmother's house in Virginia that was the beginning of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. She was also interested & knowledgeable about every aspect of the production, presentation & promotion of her work from the font type & size, the bindings & illustrations to the copy written by the publicity department of her first publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

Cather lived in New York for many years but always tried to leave the city during the heat of summer. She had several favourite places, from Jaffrey, New Hampshire to Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, where she & Edith Lewis owned a cottage. She also spent considerable time in France & New Mexico.

The editors have left Cather's wayward spelling as a young girl alone & it gives a picture of  impetuous enthusiasm about books, music & the theatre as well as an intense interest in everything that was happening to friends & family. Although her spelling improves, her love of literature & music is with her all her life. Cather was a loyal & generous friend, never forgetting S S McClure, who had given her the opportunity of editing his magazine. She also went home to Nebraska frequently & always remembered friends & neighbours at Christmas & especially during the hard times of the Depression years. Her own success meant that she had the ability to help in practical ways as well as with kind thoughts & sympathy.

I always enjoy reading about the elements that go into fiction & the way that writers can take the seed of a story from life, a scene briefly glimpsed, a person known in childhood & transform it into something new. Cather explained to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood about the characters in her story, Two Friends,

You never can get it through peoples heads that a story is made out of an emotion or an excitement and is not made out of the legs and arms and faces of one's friends or acquaintances. Two Friends, for instance, was not really made out of your father and Mr Richardson; it was made out of an effect they produced on a little girl who used to hang about them. The story, as I told you, is a picture; but it is not the picture of two men, but of a memory. Many things about both men are left out of this sketch because they made no impression on me as a child; other things are exaggerated because they seemed just like that to me then. January 27, 1934

I also enjoyed her responses to critics' opinions of her work. Margaret Laurence wrote a chapter on Cather's work &, in a letter to Carrie Sherwood, Cather praises Laurence for her understanding of her craft,

She seems to understand that I can write successfully only when I write about people or places which I very greatly admire; which, indeed, I actually love. The characters may be cranky or queer, or foolhardy and rash, but they must have something in them which gives me a thrill and warms my heart. June 28, 1939

She also had trenchant views about the value of trying to teach creative writing (in a letter to Egbert Samuel Oliver, who had written to her asking for her views),

I think it is sheer nonsense to attempt to teach "Creative Writing" in colleges. If the college students were taught to write good, sound English sentences (sentences with unmistakable articulation) and to avoid hackneyed woman's-club expressions, such as "colorful", "the desire to create", "worth while books", "a writer universally acclaimed" - all those smug expressions which really mean nothing at all - then creative writing would take care of itself. December 13, 1934

Cather's last years were made difficult by ill health. She damaged her right wrist & this restricted her ability to work. She writes that she learned to dictate her letters but could never dictate her work. She also had several operations. The deaths of those close to her, especially her parents, her brothers & Isabelle McClung, hit her very hard. She writes movingly of the loss of her father (& Dorothy's mother) & the ill-health of her mother to Dorothy Canfield Fisher,

But these vanishings, that come one after another, have such an impoverishing effect on those of us who are left - our world suddenly becomes so diminished - the landmarks disappear and all the splendid distances behind us close up. These losses, one after another, make one feel as if one were going on in a play after most of the principal characters are dead. September 30, 1930

This feeling intensified as those closest to her died, especially those who were far away. Isabelle McClung was living in France with her husband, Jan Hambourg, when she died of kidney disease in 1938. Cather wrote to her niece, Margaret,

Isabelle knew very little about books, but everything about gracious and graceful living. We brought each other up. We kept on doing that all our lives. For most of my life in Pittsburgh (five years) Isabelle and, I think, your father (Cather's brother, Roscoe), were the only two people who thought there was any good reason for my trying to write ... Isabelle has always been my best and soundest critic ... I have sent Isabelle every manuscript before I published (part missing?) were always invaluable. Her husband is returning to me three hundred of my letters which she carried about with her from place to place all the time. She had lived abroad for fourteen years, but I often went to her, and in mind we were never separated. Now we have no means of communication; that is all. One can never form such a friendship twice. One does not want to. As long as she lived, her youth and mine were realities to both of us. November 8, 1938

Reading an author's letters always takes me back to the work & I've been rereading some of Cather's short stories. I bought this Virago edition of the stories, edited by Hermione Lee, in the late 1980s. I've read The Bohemian Girl, Two Friends, A Wagner Matinée & Coming, Aphrodite! & will probably go on to read the rest of the book, as well as the novels I haven't yet read.

Top 10 Books of 2014

Happy New Year everyone. Here's to another year full of health, happiness & lots of reading time.

This time last year, I was looking at this pile of books on my desk & vowing to read at least some of them in 2014. Well, I read five of them - that's it, only five. So, the other day, I had a clearing of the decks & shelved what was left (there were another two piles of books behind these that I was going to read "next" but of course, I didn't). I also shelved the pile of books & magazines sitting on the table beside my reading chair. This year I'm going to have only the books & magazines I'm currently reading on that table. It was a wonderful feeling to see my desk almost clear, apart from library books. It also gave me time to listen to two episodes of In Our Time (on Tennyson's In Memoriam & the Restoration of Charles II) with Melvyn & guests as it took me ages to rejig the overflowing tbr shelves to fit them in to their appropriate places. See this post here if you'd like to see how I organise the tbr shelves).

Looking at that post of reading resolutions from last year I did manage to read more from the tbr shelves, including those middlebrow authors I love. I read fewer books though than I have for years - only 95 & only 3 rereads. I think I've been rereading less because I still feel I need to post regularly & I don't usually review a book if I've already written about it. I bought 181 books last year (another useful, or scary, aspect of Library Thing is that I can see when I added books) & I've read 42 of them. This sounds quite good until I confess that some of the books I bought were duplicate copies of books I already own (for the justification for that little habit, read this post). I also added 56 books to my Kindle, quite a few of them were free downloads & that doesn't include the books I bought from elsewhere such as Delphi Classics.

So, finally, here it is, my Top 10 list for 2014. It wasn't difficult to come up with the list, I knew as soon as I read most of these books that they would be on my Top 10 for the year. The books are in no particular order & the links are to my reviews.

The Far Country - Nevil Shute. As Thomas from My Porch says, Shute is D E Stevenson for boys. I loved this story of a refugee doctor who emigrates to Australia after WWII & the new life he makes for himself here.

Kirkham's Find - Mary Gaunt. A book I'd had on the tbr shelves since 1988. Another Australian story about an independent woman overcoming the disapproval of her family to make a life for herself.

The Prime Minister & The Duke's Children - Anthony Trollope. I'm going to cheat with two of my choices because I read pairs of books that go together. I finally got around to reading the last two Palliser novels this year as I watched the wonderful BBC TV series. You can't beat Trollope for an absorbing story & I loved reading about the lives of Plantagenet Palliser, Glencora & Phineas Finn, their families & friends.

Campaigning for the Vote : Kate Parry Frye's Suffrage Diary & Kate Parry Frye : the Long Life of an Edwardian Actress and Suffragette - Elizabeth Crawford. My other cheat involves the two books I read about Kate Parry Frye. I think Kate was the person I enjoyed meeting the most this year through her diary & through the excellent biography by Elizabeth Crawford. I was so moved by Kate's long life, the challenges she overcame & her courage in her later years, caring for her husband, John.

The English Air - D E Stevenson. I read 9 books by DES this year, spurred on by discovering Open Library & by the reprints of her work that seem to be coming thick & fast. The English Air was reprinted by Greyladies a couple of months ago. This was my favourite, set during WWII it's the story of a young German who visits English relatives in the years leading up to the war & experiences a new way of life that changes all his ideas.

Invisible - Christine Poulson. I haven't read many mysteries or thrillers this year at all but I did love this one. The story of a man who has secrets in his past & the woman who loves him & is drawn into danger when he disappears. I read the last half in one sitting, I just couldn't put it down.

One of Ours - Willa Cather. Another author I read when I was young is Willa Cather. I rediscovered her this year & look forward to reading more of her books & the Selected Letters in 2015. I loved the story of Claude Wheeler, his life on the family farm in Nebraska & his search for something to give his life meaning. The Great War gives him his opportunity to make a difference.

Four Sisters - Helen Rappaport. I couldn't have a Top 10 list without a couple of history books. The story of the daughters of the last Tsar was beautifully told by Helen Rappaport with such sensitivity. I especially enjoyed reading about the Grand Duchesses work as nurses in the Great War & the discovery of previously unknown letters from Anastasia to a friend when the family were in exile. A tragic story well told.

A Lifelong Passion - ed Andrei Maylunas & Sergei Mironenko. Leading on from Four Sisters, this is the story of the last Romanovs told through their letters, diaries & memoirs. Fascinating to read the story in their own words & to read the many familiar extracts & quotes in context.

Moby-Dick or, the Whale - Herman Melville. My last book of the year was one of the best. I listened to it on audio & the wonderful performance by William Hootkins made this one of the most memorable books I've ever read.

There it is, my Top 10. I'm looking forward to reading other lists from my favourite bloggers or just leave a list in the Comments.

Willa Cather Reading Week

I had plans to join in with Willa Cather Reading Week which is being hosted by Heavenali at her blog here. However, I haven't had a chance to read any Willa this week. I did read two of her novels earlier this year so I'll cheat & just link to my reviews of One Of Ours & Death Comes for the Archbishop. I loved both of them & I do plan to read & reread more Willa Cather over the summer.

Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather

This is a very quiet, elegiac book that tells an epic story. In 1851, Jean Marie Latour is appointed Apostolic Vicar to the new American state of New Mexico. Latour sets off for his new home & experiences many hardships. He must bring together the European, Mexican & Native American people of the diocese with very little help or guidance. He experiences great hardships, travelling long distances through hostile territory & has to impose his authority on recalcitrant priests. He hears stories of the past & struggles to make sense of the place of the Church in the lives of his most impoverished parishioners. Forty years later, as Latour, now Archbishop, reaches the end of his life, he spends his retirement gardening & training new missionary priests from France in the ways of his parish.

Born in France, Latour has been a parish priest near Lake Ontario since he left the seminary & went to the United States as a missionary, with his great friend, Father Joseph Vaillant. Latour is sent to New Mexico to take charge of a vast diocese that has had no real discipline imposed on it for some time. The original Spanish missionaries who went out to New Mexico were driven out in the early 18th century & the current Bishop of Durango simply ignores the directives sent by his superiors in Rome. Latour & Vaillant reach Santa Fe to discover that no one knows who they are & no one pays them any attention. The documents sent to announce his appointment are at the mercy of a non-existent postal service so Latour decides to go to Old Mexico to visit the Bishop in person.

On this first journey in his new home, Latour becomes lost & is lucky to stumble across a Mexican settlement where he is welcomed & his arrival is seen as the answer to prayer as the villagers have been without the services of a priest for some time. There are marriages to be performed & children to baptize. This first experience shows Father Latour where his efforts must be directed. He sees his deliverance from almost certain death as a sign that he has made the right decision in coming to New Mexico.

Father Latour returns to Santa Fe after meeting the Bishop & receiving his accreditation from him to find that Father Vaillant has already made progress with the priests of the city. The two men are opposites in almost every way but the mission needs all their qualities. Father Vaillant is practical & determined. He has reorganized their house & taken charge of the cooking. While Father Latour worries about the size of the diocese & the many irregularities he has already heard about, Father Vaillant urges him to concentrate on sorting out Santa Fe first. Father Vaillant is often sent out to bring an unruly parish back into the fold & spends his life as a missionary in the farthest reaches of the country. Father Latour impresses by his compassion, his integrity & his devotion to the people he serves. Neither would have been successful without the other. At the end of the novel, Father Vaillant reflects on the differences in the two men,

Wherever he went, he soon made friends that took the place of country and family. But Jean, who was at ease in any society and always the flower of courtesy, could not form new ties. It had always been so. He was like that even as a boy; gracious to everyone, but known to very few.

There are some wonderful stories in the novel. Father Vaillant is short & has trouble riding a horse comfortably. He convinces a wealthy parishioner to give him not one but two mules - one for himself & one for Father Latour. Father Vaillant could not be happy with a comfort that his friend could not share & the mules had been brought up together & so would be miserable apart. It's done with such humour & humility that the parishioner, who was happy to give one mule, decides that he's just as happy to give both his prize animals. Father Vaillant later goes to the goldfields of Colorado to minister to the miners & bring some religious comfort to a lawless place. He has a wagon constructed especially to carry all the things he will need to save souls & spread the Gospel & he & his wagon soon become famous throughout the territory. He would return to New Mexico on what he called begging expeditions but never returned for good.

Another time, the two priests are travelling in unfamiliar territory when they stop to ask shelter from a man whom they instantly dislike. His frightened, downtrodden Mexican wife, at great risk to herself, warns them to leave immediately &, acting on their own instincts, they do so. The woman, Magdalena, escapes in fear of her life & follows the priests back to Santa Fe. She tells them of her husband's cruelty & that he had murdered four travellers & had planned to murder the priests as well.

The journeys taken by the priests show them the vastness of the territory. I loved the descriptions of the wilderness & the landscape. Father Latour is a very self-contained man but he responds to the beauty of the landscape. He respects all his parishioners & treats them all with love & compassion. He is strict in his expectations of his priests, however, & his standards of behaviour are met eventually by the many renegade priests who had exploited the laxity of the previous Bishop's rule.

As I said at the beginning, this is an elegiac book. That may seem odd when there is so much action, so much danger & peril. However, there's a serenity in Willa Cather's writing that I find so attractive. Father Vaillant often said that he had wished for a life of contemplation before he agreed to go out as a missionary but realised that God had other, better plans for him. The strength of the two men's belief & conviction is at the core of the story & it's their confidence that they are on the right path, no matter how difficult or perilous their situation, that is so admirable. They are humble, very attractive personalities & I loved reading about their lives & about a part of the world I knew nothing about. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a beautiful book & I'm looking forward to reading more Willa Cather very soon.

One of Ours - Willa Cather

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. ... the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, and intense kind of pain, - the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!

Claude Wheeler has grown up on a farm in Nebraska. His father is prosperous but unsympathetic, prone to laughing at his sensitive son's desire to do more with his life. His mother is quiet & pious, supportive but powerless to influence her overbearing husband. Claude's older brother Bayliss has already left home & runs a store in the town. Younger brother Ralph is indulged & full of his own importance. Mahailey, the cook & housekeeper, does her best to help Claude & his mother.

Claude's best friend is Ernest, who has immigrated from Germany & can't understand Claude's desire for something different. "You Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to warm you up , and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not very much can happen to us, we know that, - and we learn to make the most of little things". Claude finally convinces his father to allow him to go away to college & there he meets the Erlich family, who are everything Claude wants to be. European, cultured, welcoming. They're not a rich family but they don't worry about their poverty as Claude worries about having the right clothes or knowing the right things.

Claude's time at college comes to an abrupt end when his father sends Ralph off to manage a farm he's bought & Claude must come home. He thinks he's found his ideal in Enid Royce. He builds a beautiful home for them & has great plans but the marriage is a failure. Enid is more interested in her work for the Temperance Society & her sister's missionary work in China, than in her husband. Another dream shatters as Enid leaves to look after her ailing sister & Claude abandons his new home & goes back to the farm.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 reignites his interest & his idealism. Although the United States doesn't enter the war for several years, Claude & his mother follow the war news in the newspapers with great interest. Here, at last, Claude believes, is an ideal worth pursuing. The sinking of the Lusitania & the stories of the suffering of refugees fire him with the desire to help the Europe he learnt about in college & on his visits to the Erlichs. He's ashamed that his country is just standing by, but as soon as the US enters the war, Claude enlists & is sent to France. He survives a horrendous voyage on a troop ship & undertakes more training when he reaches France. Eventually he is sent to the Front.

I loved this book, it will definitely be in my Top 10 of the year. Claude is a wonderful character, always dissatisfied & looking for more but never sulky or sullen. Maybe he's over-sensitive about his shortcomings but he is always searching for a life more fulfilling than the one mapped out for him by his father. Claude is a compassionate man. He never reproaches Enid for the failure of their marriage although he should have listened to her father, who warned him from his own bitter experience how a marriage to a woman like Enid could be. After every disappointment, Claude retreats & then starts searching again.

Willa Cather writes so beautifully of the Nebraska she knew as a girl, all the descriptive writing is so vivid whether in Nebraska or France. Here, Claude has an introduction from a friend to Mlle de Courcy, a woman living in one of the newly liberated areas of France. His visit lasts only an afternoon but their talk ranges over the past & the present as he tells her about Nebraska & the farm & she describes how she has survived the years of occupation.

There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the sun, the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop which he would never find again.

Elegiac moments like this are contrasted with the horrors of war as the young Americans are thrown into the chase after the retreating German Army.

Willa Cather wrote, in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, about her cousin, Grosvenor, & the influence that his life had on the creation of Claude,

We were very much alike, and very different. He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous.... I was staying on his father's farm when the war broke out. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind.... I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose. It was all too painfully familiar. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all.

Cather's own struggle to leave the prairie behind is also part of Claude. She didn't want the book to be labelled a "war novel", but inevitably, it was. Published in 1922, the critics were mostly unkind, praising the first half set in Nebraska because that's what they considered she knew best, but disliking the sections dealing with the war as they thought she romanticized this conflict that sent so many young men to their deaths. However, it became a bestseller & won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

I read quite a few of Willa Cather's novels when I was a teenager but I haven't read any in recent years apart from The Song of the Lark. I've been reading Heavenali's reviews of Cather, including One of Ours, & I've ordered Sapphira and the Slave Girl & Death Comes for the Archbishop. More for the tbr shelves!

New arrivals

Some books that I had on pre-order & standing order have arrived over the last week or so & a few impulse buys as well.
At the top & bottom of this pile are the latest books from Slightly Foxed. The latest SF edition is I Was A Stranger by John Haskett, the WWII memoir of a soldier hiding from the Germans in Holland after the Battle of Arnhem in 1944. I'm also collecting the SF Cubs, Ronald Welch's series of historical novels for children. The latest is Captain of Foot, set during the Napoleonic Wars.

These lovely Crime Classics from the British Library seduced me with their covers taken from railway posters of the 1930s. I'd never heard of John Bude but I love English mysteries set between the wars & these have Introductions by Martin Edwards, one of my favourite writers of mystery fiction.
Death goes Dancing by Mabel Esther Allan is the latest from Greyladies, a mystery set in the world of ballet.

I must have seen a mention of Willa Cather's One of Ours on the blog of someone taking up the LibraryThing Virago WWI challenge but I'd forgotten that when I ordered it. I only remembered when I read Heavenali's review of it this week. The Virago edition is no longer in print, unfortunately, but I love Vintage UK & US editions. This isn't the cover I thought I would receive but I love it even more.

Two Penguins next. I read this review of Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia, Tales of Angria, by Kate at Vulpes Libres.

Even though I already had this 1980s Penguin edition of the juvenilia of Charlotte & Jane Austen, I had to have this new edition. There are a couple of stories in this edition that aren't in the older one & the Introduction is extensive. It's been too long since I read about Angria.

The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs edited by Steve Roud & Julia Bishop was another impulse based on the beautiful woodcut on the cover. I am interested in folk songs, especially the lovely arrangements of many of them that were composed in the early 20th century by Ralph Vaughan Williams & Gerald Finzi, among others. Especially when they're sung by Bryn Terfel.

Finally, some history. I heard a podcast with Helen Castor recently & was reminded that I'd enjoyed her TV series about the She-Wolves of English history (Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France & Margaret of Anjou) but hadn't read the book. The Third Plantagenet is John Ashdown-Hill's latest book about George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV & Richard III. Was he really drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower? Was he really as unpleasant as I've always thought him? I'm afraid I always think of him as "the ineffable George" as Josephine Tey describes him in The Daughter of Time. Alan Grant also says, "George could obviously be talked into anything. He was the born missionee." I'll be interested to discover if there was more to him.

Song of the Lark - Willa Cather

I read quite a few of Willa Cather's novels & short stories when I was younger but I hadn't read her for a very long time. I think I bought this edition of The Song of the Lark because of the beautiful Hammershoi picture on the cover. I love his work, so cool & serene. Then, the book sat on the tbr shelves for nearly 10 years until I decided it was time to read it. I'm glad I finally got around to it. I was reminded of the reasons why I enjoyed Willa Cather's writing all those years ago.

The Song of the Lark is the story of the growth of an artist. Thea Kronborg is the daughter of a Methodist preacher in Moonstone, Colorado. One of seven children, her life is hard but not unhappy. Thea learns piano from Herr Wunsch, a German immigrant who has fallen on hard times. Thea's Scandinavian heritage is something she has in common with many of the characters in Cather's other novels. But The Song of the Lark isn't a story of farming families living on the land. Thea knows she is destined for great things. Her determination to study music sets her apart from her siblings & her contemporaries.

Of this feeling Thea had never spoken to any human being until that day when she told Harsanyi that "there had always been - something."  Hitherto she had felt but one obligation toward it - secrecy; to protect it even from herself. She had always believed that by doing all that was required of her by her family, her teachers, her pupils, she kept that part of herself from being caught up in the meshes of common things. She took it for granted that, some day, when she was older, she would know a great deal more about it. It was as if she had an appointment to meet the rest of herself sometime, somewhere. It was moving to meet her & she was moving to meet it.

At first she studies piano but when, with the aid of a small inheritance, she goes to Chicago to study, her teacher, Harsanyi, recognizes that her voice is special & encourages her to study opera. Thea's determination is formidable. She makes few friends because she is impatient with anyone who doesn't work as hard as herself. She finds that she's grown away from her family & the people of Moonstone. One friend of her childhood, Dr Howard Archie, remains steadfast & helps her to move to Chicago. Thea's bond with Dr Archie was formed in her childhood & he encourages her to strive for more than a life as a piano teacher in small, dusty towns.

Thea also meets Fred Ottenburg, the son of a wealthy brewer, who introduces her to a new circle of society where her talents are noticed & appreciated. The most important thing Fred does for her is not to fall in love with her - although he does - but to send her off to his family's ranch in Panther Canyon, Arizona, to rest when she's exhausted with overwork. This is the central experience of Thea's life. She becomes entranced with the canyon, the remnants of the ancient people who once lived in the caves there. She spends all day walking & resting & thinking about her future.

Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older. She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much. Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff. Moonstone and Chicago had become vague. Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood. Her mind had been like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab. And here she must throw this lumber away. The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest. Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer. She felt united and strong.

Fred joins her in the canyon & Thea realises that she loves him. However, Fred is unable to marry her & Thea's career leads her to study in Europe & a return, years later, to New York, where she meets Fred & Dr Archie again as she's on the brink of a brilliant career.

The Song of the Lark was a very personal book for Willa Cather. It's more autobiographical than many of her other novels. Her childhood was very like Thea's, although she was to be a writer rather than a musician. She also spent time in Walnut Canyon, Arizona with her brother, Douglass. This was the inspiration for Thea's trip to Panther Canyon. It's an early novel, published in 1915 &, in the Preface to the 1932 edition, she describes it as a partial failure because the early parts of the book about Thea's struggle are more interesting than Thea's success, "Success is never so interesting as struggle".

I'd agree that the first half of the book is more absorbing. I loved the picture of the small town life Thea lives with her family, her younger brother, Thor, who she drags around in his wagon, her friendships with Dr Archie, Ray Kennedy, a railroad man, & the Mexican immigrants who live on the edge of the town. Thea's relationship with her calm, intelligent mother is also fascinating. Thea's mother sees her daughter's talent & does everything she can to support her. The section about Panther Canyon is the heart of the book. Thea's explorations of the canyon, her almost ritual bathing in a pool of clear water, her delight in nature, the space she is able to create to think & plan her future are central to her life. The later sections in New York about Thea's career are less interesting but I still enjoyed reading about Thea's life & ambitions & about how she deals with the essential loneliness of an artist. I'm glad I finally got around to reading The Song of the Lark. I read several of her books years ago - O Pioneers!, My Antonia, Lucy Gayheart - but I've never read her New Mexico novels & I think I should do something about that.