O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Emil stood looking down at her, holding his shoulders stiff and stiffening the arm to which she clung. Her white dress looked gray in the darkness. She seemed like a troubled spirit, like some shadow out of the earth, clinging to him and entreating him to give her peace. Behind her the fireflies were weaving in and out over the wheat. He put his hand on her bent head. "On my honor, Marie, if you will say you love me, I will go away."

She lifted her face to his. "How could I help it? Don't you know?"

Emil was the one who trembled, through all his frame. After he left Marie at her gate, he wandered the fields all night, till morning put out the fireflies and the stars.

I tried to read O Pioneers! several years ago while driving through Nebraska. It opens with the young Alexandra Bergson asking Carl Linstrum to save her brother Emil's cat from where it's climbed up an icy pole. Winter on "the Divide" is a gray and monotonous thing, even for a place that feels monotonous even in the summer, and Cather's prose is grown in that soil: spare, cautious, without adornment. It's beautiful, if you know how to look, but it's not going to tell you how to look. In that way, it's a lot like Nebraska. Anyway, the combination of being in Nebraska and reading about Nebraska in Nebraskan prose was too much for me and I had to put it away.

Reading it now, I'm sorry I let it go too quickly. O Pioneers! is a beautiful love letter to the Nebraska of Cather's youth, and it's a bittersweet counterpart to the (mostly) more optimistic My Antonia. Cather's main characters are all established in that first scene: Alexandra, who is entrusted pages later to keep up the land by her dying father; Carl, a man she loves who ends up leaving Nebraska; Emil, the sensitive young boy who will hopefully be the beneficiary of the prosperity Alexandra promise to her father; and Marie Tovesky, the curly-haired darling who plays with Emil as a child and later marries the moody, tragic Frank Shabata.

O Pioneers! moves across time in fits and starts. We get to see Alexandra fulfill the promise she made to her father, buying up adjacent lots and turning the Bergson homestead into the most successful on the Divide. But prosperity brings change, and ruins her selfish brothers Lou and Oscar, whose masculine entitlement makes them believe they, and not Alexandra, are the ones responsible. Prosperity allows Emil to move to Mexico City to escape his hopeless love for Marie Shabata. And it wreaks changes on the land itself, too, which grows and changes, though something of the pioneer spirit that dominated its early days is a little lost. Alexandra and Emil, who are the novel's twin moral centers, are perhaps the only one with enough perspective to see this, and its bittersweet nature finds expression in the symbol of a wild duck:

Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun. In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasures. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, "Sister, you know our duck down there'--" Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.

My first impressions of O Pioneers! was that it was a lot like My Antonia, though perhaps a little simpler and more pastoral. Alexandra Bergson has the same determination as Antonia, but it's rarely in any opposition to the land, or to the new society that grows up around the homestead; she moves in it more easily and naturally. All that is to say I wasn't prepared for O Pioneers! to end the way it did, with violence and bloodshed breaking into the peaceful nature of the plains. Death is a part of both books for sure, but mostly it comes in the form of illness, exhaustion, or age. As Emil thinks, looking on the grave of a friend, "That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness." (What sins I might happily commit to write a sentence like that just once in my life.) In retrospect, that should have been a warning that Emil's attitude is bound to be challenged. I liked Antonia better, but O Pioneers! shocked me, which is something I hadn't really expected from Cather.