O Pioneers! (Oxford World's Classics)

Swedes homesteading on the short grass prairie! How come I'd never read this book?

Actually, this comes close to being the true story of my mother's immigrant farmer family, who were Germans of a sort. Alexandra, the powerful woman at the heart of Cather's story, the one pictured on the cover of this edition, reminds me powerfully of my great-grandmother, who was just a generation younger than Willa Cather. Alexandra's two selfish and small-minded brothers, Lou and Oscar, are spitting-images of my grandfather and his brother. Frank Shabata, the sorry husband, is 'awful close' to a portrayal of my father. The verisimilitude of Cather's characters, so fair and square in depicting both their strength and their frailty, is her best accomplishment as a writer. You won't need family photos of these characters to recognize them as real people.

The part that's not true to the history of my family as pioneers and sod-busters is also what's not true about the novel. The real people were more ordinary, lived more one-day-at-a-time, didn't have the luxury to leaping across a flat and commonplace decade from one chapter to the next. They had to get up in the morning, drudge through the day, cut their toe nails and scrape their corns, go to bed too worried about chores and bills to dream big dreams. But who would want to read about them?

"O Pioneers!" is a triple love story, starring three handsome men and two beautiful women. One couple ends up happy... as happy as they're able to be, anyway. There's plenty of passion, frustration, jealousy, misunderstanding to make a Hollywood blockbuster on the scale of "Giant". For all I know, there have been ten films of this novel already. That's weakness of the book, one way it falls short of really deserving to be called a "world's classic", that it was ripe for Hollywood when it was published in 1913, even before Hollywood was ripe for it.

"O Pioneers!" is also a love song to the Land, to the beauty and bounty of the short grass prairie. It begins with a description of the hard-scrabble homestead and it ends with a paean to the "...fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!" Now that's a 'right pretty' sentiment, but it's not terribly accurate. Teachers, don't assign this book as a depiction of the history of the Midwest. Some few sodbusters may have felt ennobled by their land, but a lot more of them were plenty ready to sell to greenhorns and move farther west or south. That's the true story of the agricultural frontier in America, from colonial days through the Ohio Valley and onward to the Dakotas; those who got rich did so more by selling than by clinging to the soil. Cather herself may have loved the western skies but she wrote under the skies of eastern and European cities. Those shining-eyed Young have been fleeing to either coast since the first pioneers gave birth to them. The prosperity that Cather portrayed among the Swedes and Bohemians of Nebraska in the years before WW1 was an artifact of the world economy. It was a bubble. It collapsed soon enough. Nebraska and the Dakotas haven't thrived in the way "O Pioneers!" envisioned. Declining populations, stagnant and dying towns, narrow-minded reactionary social and political grudges against the very sort of people that Willa Cather became! The story of Alexandra and Carl ends at the brink of their future; I can almost promise you that if they'd lived as long as my great-grandmother, they'd have retired in Arizona.

But there is a resonant grandeur to "O Pioneers!" It's worth reading, in order to sense the courage and hardihood of the farmer-immigrants who built the heartland of America. It's not as colorful or touching as the work of Ole Rolvaag; "Giants in the Earth" and its sequels are the greatest 'world's classics' of the American West. It's not as honest and accurate as Hamlin Garland's "Main-Traveled Roads". It's nowhere near the epic adventure, the magniloquent sweep, of the four Emigrant novels of the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. But once you pick it up, you won't be tempted to read anything else until you finish it, and once you finish it, the woman Alexandra will stick in the family-photo album of your mind.

In this, the author's second published work, the author writes about that which she knew best, early pioneer life in Nebraska, the place to which she and her family moved in 1883 when she was a mere slip of a girl. She eventually attended the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1995, at a time when most girls did no such thing.

In this work, the author was on very sure footing. Her clear, straightforward prose lends itself capably to the story of early pioneers who went to Nebraska and set down roots, weathering the exigencies that often plagued a newcomer to a particular region. It is a surprisingly unsentimental look at pioneer life.

This thematically complex, but simply written story focuses primarily on Alexandra Bergson, the intelligent, independent, resourceful, and strong-willed daughter of pioneer John Bergson. Upon his death he did what was then the nearly unthinkable. He left his land in the hands of his oldest child, his daughter, Alexandra, rather than in those of his sons, recognizing in his daughter those qualities that would ensure that his land would prosper under her stewardship.

This then is the story of not only Alexandra but of that land and those whose sustenance depended upon its fruitfulness. The reader follows the Bergson clan as they live their lives and interact with their neighbors. Under Alexandra's skillful management, the Bergson farm prospers. As the farm prospers, so does its environs, as the area becomes a bustling center of activity with more and more settlers developing the land around that of the Bergsons.

Thematically, the book explores the vicissitudes of life, as well as its life-affirming moments. As in all lives, the characters in this book experience moments of high drama and great tragedy, as well as memorable moments of love and hate. All this is grounded within the context of pioneer life, with all its hardships and privations, as well as its occasional abundance. The author skillfully re-creates a melting pot of the many nationalities that cultivated the land known as Nebraska.

This is a book that those who like reading about pioneer life will certainly enjoy, as will those who simply like a well-written book with a tale to tell. This classic novel was also adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame film, starring Jessica Lange in the role of Alexandra Bergson.

This novel revolves around Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant tilling land in Nebraska. Few female characters in American literature have her feminine strength. Maybe Dagny Taggart of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged?" Or Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara of "Gone With the Wind." Scarlett and Alexandra are the adhesive, business-minded, matronly women who run things in an otherwise man's world.

Having lived in the midwest for numerous years, albeit in the 1970's, I met people who mirrored the mannerisms and had the backgrounds of Alexandra. Like Alexandra, their parents left continental or scandinavian Europe for Nebraska's farmland. These people are as pure as the black loess within which the corn and wheat survive.

Like many novels of this generation, this tale involves tragedy. A great tragedy. And, like Rand, many conversations about the seemingly obvious include contrarian statements which loudly ring otherwise unobserved truths. For instance, Alexandra seeks to pardon the murderer of those closest to her - she seeks to pardon someone whose single act clouded and depressed her soul forever. But, when you read this novel, you will agree with her decision. One hundred percent.

Agrarian life, sometimes subjected to nature's entropy, is more than a seemingly simple venture. The character of Alexandra also is more complex than her appearance. She was a genius at farming. Today's farmers rotate to keep the land's fertility alive - grow alfalfa (to put nitrogen in the soil) to replenish what corn depletes. Alexandra speaks about rotating her soil because she heard about the concept from a "college boy." They laughed at her. She grew wheat as the revenue stream from the land would increase. They laughed at her. Like Taggart and O'Hara, she was right while the dumb men around her were not. Unlike Taggart or O'Hara, Alexandra moves without confrontation, without eddy, without notice.

She writes without wasting words, many details are delivered with few words. Her style reminds me of J.M. Coetzee or V.S. Naipaul. She is in very good company. She is a novelist I will read again.

Cather published her second novel, O Pioneers, in 1913 at the age of 40. Together with My Antonia it is the novel for which she is best known. Years after writing the book, Cather wrote of it " Since I wrote this book for myself, I ignored all the situations and accents that were then thought to be necessary."
The book takes place on the plains of Nebraska in the late 19th Century as the Prairie is settled be Swedish, Bohemian, and French immigrants trying to eke out a living from what appears to be a harsh, inhospitable land. The heroine of the book is Alexandra Bergson who inherits her father's farm as a young woman, raises his three sons and stays with the farm through the harsh times to become a successful landowner and farmer.

The books speaks of being wedded to the land and to place. In this sense it is an instance of the American dream of a home. It also speaks of a strong woman, not in cliched, late 20th Century terms but with a sense of ambiguity, difficulty and loss.

This is a story as well of thwarted love, of the difficult nature of sexualtiy, and of human passion. There is also the beginning of what in Cather's works will become an increased sense of religion, Catholicism in particular, as a haven and a solace for the sorrow she finds at the heart of human endeavor. Above all it is a picuure of stark life in the midwest.

There is almost as much blood-letting in this short book as in an Elizabethan tragedy. Cather's picture of American life on the plains, even in her earliest books, is not an easy or simple one. Some readers may quarrel with the seemingly happy ending of the book. I don't think any will deny that Alexandra's happiness is dearly bought or that it is bittersweet.

I tendend to shy away from this book in favor of Cather's later novels. I feared that it would be conventional and trite. The stereotyping was mine,however. This is a thoughtful, well written story of immigrant life on the plains and of the sorrow pain, and strength of the American experience.

Robin Friedman

I didn't even realize that this was part of a trilogy when I first read it, as it works very well on its own apparently. That said, Willa Cather is addicting and as soon as you have read on book you'll want to read the others, so you might as well press on to The Song of the Lark and My Antonia.