One of Ours by Willa Cather (1922. Alfred Knopf. Reprinted by
Forgotten Books. ISBN 978-144003547-0)
Most of us at one point or another in our reading careers have read Death
Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!, and My Antonia by acclaimed
American Plains and Western novelist, Willa Cather. But few of us, I am
fairly certain, outside of serious students of Cather’s work, have heard of,
much less read, One of Ours, a tale that straddles two genres, that of Plains
hardscrabble fiction and war novel.
At first, attempting to meld those two distinct brands of invented lives
might seem a bit awkward, forced, or even foolhardy. But in the end, in the
hands of a master storyteller like Willa Cather, One of Ours satisfies both as
to craft and plot.
Set in pre-Great War Nebraska on the Wheeler place, a farm owned by Nat
and Evangeline Wheeler, a large spread where the parents have raised their
three boys: Bayliss, Claude, and Ralph, One of Ours isn’t the stereotypical
novel of hard luck and tragedy that we’ve come to expect from farm stories
of its time.
Though Nat Wheeler is a big, powerful man who owns much
property, he is content to allow others to work his land, renting pasture and
cropland to local farmers who are down on their luck. Cather’s construction
of the fictional patriarch of the Wheeler clan is nuanced. One expects, at
every turn of a phrase, to find some evil lurking in Nat, a man who is far
more wealthy and prosperous than his favored mode of transportation, a
rickety old horse drawn cart, lets on. But such revelations never occur. In
addition, it’s not that the Wheeler patriarch spurns technology: he owns
motor cars and uses the services of mechanized harvesters and, in one brief
reference, even flies between Nebraska and Colorado to visit his youngest
son Ralph, who has been installed as the head of the Wheeler ranching
operations in the foothills of the Rockies. But despite his reluctant embrace
of technology, in many ways Nat Wheeler is a throw back to another age,
another time, when immigrant men busted sod, lived in earthen dugouts,
fought nature, and tried to make a living on 160 acres of homestead land.
Evangeline, the matriarch of the clan, comes off as loving, if a bit
stereotypical. She is the devoted mother, the glue that keeps the family unit
humming despite Nat’s sometimes indifferent and distant approach to child
rearing. Mahailey, the Wheeler housekeeper, a Southern refugee from the
Civil War living in the Wheeler home, is the tale’s comic relief. By dialect
and attribute, she reminds me of Prissy, the servant in Gone with the Wind
even though, somewhere in the text, we finally come to learn that Mahailey
isn’t black but a poor white woman.
But by far the most interesting female character in the book is the
asexual Enid, the woman that Claude ends up “settling” for when the true
love of his life, Gladys, the local school marm, appears destined to marry
Bayliss Wheeler, the frugal, passionless eldest Wheeler boy. Whereas
conventional storytelling might turn Enid’s coyness and reluctance towards
physicality into eventual fondness and love for Claude, Cather avoids such
scripted prose. Cather’s Enid stays true to her nature, which in large part, is
driven by religious faith. Over time, Enid’s recalcitrance towards intimacy
bedevils Claude to the point where he is on the cusp of enlisting in the Army
to fight in the Great War. But before Claude can make such a bold and clear
statement against his wife, Enid abandons the marriage to undertake a
missionary journey.
Cather then weaves, upon the twin departures of her main protagonists
in the prairie tale—Claude to France and Enid to China—a fine depiction of
trench warfare. The author’s descriptive powers capture the brutality, filth,
danger, and respite of the latter months of the Great War, a conflict that
introduced the world to poison gas, tanks, dogfights, submarines, and a host
of other dastardly inventions bent on the destruction of fighting men. In
many ways, the storytelling in the last third of the book, the portion devoted
to Claude’s experiences in France, is reminiscent of Hemingway’s best:
terse, manly, bold, and descriptive in a minimalist way. There are no excess
adjectives or adverbs lurking in Cather’s prose, no embellishments or
flourishes to wow the critics: Just plain, simple god-awfully good writing.
This is a strong willed, well-told tale that melds the two genres of its
theme into a cohesive story of family, love, angst, honor, and duty. My only
critique of the book is that a story of this standing and caliber deserves far
better formatting and editing than is provided in the current edition from
Forgotten Books. The edition is replete with typos and errors in typesetting
that diminish one’s ability to enjoy one of Cather’s least known, and bestwritten novels. Btu that having been said, it is a true joy as a writer and a
reader, to explore, even in its diminished form, writing that delivers art and
wonder in equal measure:
Claude lay still, his arms under his head, looking up at the hard, polished
blue sky, watching the flocks of crows go over from fields where theyfed on
shattered grain, to their nests in the trees along Lovely Creek. He was
thinking about what Dan had said while they were hitching up. There was a
great deal of truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he would
rather go out into the world and earn his bread among strangers than sweat
under this half-responsibility for acres and crops that were not his own. He
knew that his father was sometimes called a “land-hog” by the country
people, and he himself had begun to feel that it as not right they should have
so much land—farm, or to rent, or to leave idle as they chose. It was
strange that in all the centuries the world had been going, the question of
property had not been better adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to
it, and the people who didn’t have it were slaves to them.
Though I am not a huge eBook fan, preferring to consider my prose in
the old fashioned way, I have read both the Kindle version and the trade
paperback version of One of Ours. Given the formatting issues addressed
above, I’d recommend the eBook version of the novel as the better choice.
4 and ½ stars out of 5. This book holds up well across time.