Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather and Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

He happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what is called a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he he had determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which confronted him, -- of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like being buried alive.

Bartley Alexander is a renowned builder of bridges. He's hard at work on a bridge in Canada that will be the world's longest cantilever bridge, and his reputation has made him a public figure of know-how and enterprise. He's married to an elegant, pragmatic woman named Winifred, but on a trip to London, he reconnects with a spirited Irish actress named Hilda, whom he threw over to marry his now-wife. Meeting her again reignites his passion, and soon they are in the throws of a love affair that sunders Bartley's personality between the private and the public, and threatens to destroy him.

Alexander's Bridge was Cather's first novel. It was followed less than a year later by a masterpiece, O Pioneers!; Alexander's Bridge is not a masterpiece. It wears its debt to Henry James openly on its sleeve, but Cather was never a very Jamesian writer. James might have worked out the psychology of Bartley's affair to the most minute detail, but Cather's writing is all wrong for intricacy. Her characters are too plainspoken, to us and to themselves; there's not many shades of sentiment or feeling. Cather tends to say one thing and to say it well. It's perhaps unfair to think of it this way, but it's why she's so much more talented at capturing the life of a Nebraska homesteader, whose life, like her prose, is made up of the most simple things in delicate and meaningful arrangement. The Boston-to-London life of Bartley Alexander makes more room for a Jamesian artifice that Cather seems to think she's interested in, but isn't.

The novel ends--spoiler--with the collapse of the record-breaking bridge in Canada. Bartley has had to skimp on materials to meet the cost demands of his benefactors, but there's no way to test whether they'll hold until the bridge is built. They don't, and Bartley is drowned in the collapse of his greatest achievement. This ending really is beneath the writer that Cather would become: pointedly symbolic, but not really integrated with character or plot. The bridge collapses because Bartley collapses, riven by his double life, but this image is too easy and too predictable to really work.

That the novel of manners was not her metier she had to learn the hard way, by writing one. Alexander's Bridge is a case of borrowed finery, as she felt almost immediately on its completion. Still, reading it today one fids much to admire in the book's tragic love triangle.... One cannot help suspecting Cather was here expressing the divided state of her own personal life, split as it was between two women, Isabelle and Edith. This cannot be demonstrated; I only propose it here as a possibility.

In his biography of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas, Benjamin Taylor describes Alexander's Bridge as a failure that Cather was aware of. She was pushing forty; to have her first novel as an artistic failure might have scared her off forever. Thank God she kept on writing and produced O Pioneers!. Taylor's book marches dutifully through Cather's life from book to book and story to story, and its clear that the author is a passionate fan who loves the texts about which he's writing. The book--which is very short for a biography--lingers most leisurely when discussing the books themselves. Much of the book is taken up with unpacking the tone and quality of the books' reviews--which were deemed a success, which a failure, etc., etc.

All that, I thought, comes at the cost of never really dipping too far past the surface of Cather's life. We get the fascinating tidbit, which I did not know, that Cather's lifelong "companion" Edith Lewis was actually her second love, after a woman named Isabelle McClung who broke Cather's heart by marrying. What her compensatory relationship with Edith was like is barely touched upon here. Perhaps there's little way to know what went on in this "Boston marriage," but Cather and her writing are too much the focus here to really admit anyone else. Like Cather's novels, the biography is made up of simple stuff delicately arranged, but like all homages and imitations, it pales against the quality of the master.