O Pioneers!
An exclamation point was obviously needed in Willa Cather’s first in the “Plains Trilogy.”
Effortlessly readable, and imbued with a physical space that lightens, in the end O Pioneers! (1913) still leads you to darker corners. First love and sustainable happiness are not meant to coincide. It is also sad because the natural world seemed so invincible then.
The Bergsons are a Swedish family on the rough Nebraska frontier in the late 19th century. Oscar and Lou are brothers with the standard pull of young men: work, progenate, and be possibly revered in old age. Emil is a young boy--precocious but venerating his elders. And there is Alexandra--”tall, strong...with a man’s long ulster...carried like a young soldier.” At the beginning of Cather’s second novel, Alexandra tends to her dying father as the brothers shuffle around to stem off emotion--all during one of those I-can’t-possibly-imagine-mid-nineteenth-century-prairie-winters. You know the type. The dying man’s wish is for Alexandra to make the decisions going forward--an unusual request for the time but rooted in, what soon becomes apparent, his faith in her brain and judgment.
The book tracks her rise from the sod longhouse where Mr. Bergson lay dying to a modern ranch house at the turn of the century--with all the amenities of comfort and culture. The story traces the hardship of eking it out on the inhospitable frontier--with its rough terrain, elusive soil, and unremitting weather. Cather’s usual suspects (a bit stereo-typed) are present. Thoughtful Bohemian Germans, jovial French, and scrupulous, penny-pinching Scandinavians. She casts an America made up of non-Americans--living in this big, open space (native peoples are maybe no surprise conspicuously absent from Pioneers) rising and falling, yet always slowly growing--like a wild meadow taking root and becoming soft, seamless pasture.
There is bigotry, villains similar to others of the era—those in Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) and Wharton’s Custom of the Country (1913) to name a few. New “practical,” “respectable” and money-minded families who despise “old” ideas and attempt to root out pagan-era hangers on. You exit the scene as they come on the rise.
Cather doesn’t cushion that terrible feeling of old, benign things dying out. But in a boundless humanity you’ll find inherent in her works, she gives her people a lucky chance to live well.