by Hermione Lee
Mencken’s and Hemingway’s condescension about her feminine ‘Catherization’ of the war scenes is something of an injustice. It is Claude, not Cather, who is the naive idealist, and the narrator is careful to give an unsettling context for his idealism, just as Crane does for Henry Fleming. The influence is acknowledged:
These were the first wounded men Claude had seen. To shed bright blood, to wear the red badge of courage, – that was one thing; but to be reduced to this was quite another. Surely, the sooner these boys died, the better. [OOO, p.335]
And the sooner the better for Claude, the novel makes us feel. There is a gap between the idealistic hero and the deflating, realist narrative. Here, Claude, on the march at last, wears ‘a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country’ as he sees ‘the reassuring signs of the nearing front’:
long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance, – with no purpose at all. [OOO, p.358]
Not only the landscape of war – just a ‘great dump-heap’ – but all the characters surrounding Claude on his way there, undermine his aspiration of ‘dying for an idea’. All his potential role-models refuse for themselves any language of heroism. Dr ‘Trueman’, courageously treating the appalling epidemic on the ‘Anchises’, speaks only matter-of-fact realities (‘There’s not castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside’ [OOO, p.296]) in order to deal with the conditions. Claude may be ‘enjoying himself’ on board, [OOO, p.311] filled with a new sense of purpose, but all round him ‘the air was fetid with sickness and sweat and vomit’ and men are dying in agony, being chucked overboard like ‘rotten ropes’. Victor Morse, the Anglicized aviator, seems to Claude a glamorous figure, with his scorn for his small-town Iowa background, his worldly knowledge of sex and European society, and his desperado recklessness, but in reality his London mistress is old enough to be his mother, he has a dose of the clap (indirectly but clearly hinted at in Dr Trueman’s refusal to treat him) and his bravery is suicidal: ‘ “In the air service”, said Victor carelessly, “we don’t concern ourselves about the future. It’s not worth while.” ’ [OOO, p.306] David Gerhardt consoles himself with a half-formed idea that ‘the young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the world’. [OOO, p.409] But what he feels far more acutely is the destruction of beautiful and historical things (his Stradivarius is symbolically ‘smashed into a thousand pieces’, [OOO, p.409]) the waste of his talents and the futility of what they are doing: ‘ “Oh, one violinist more or less doesn’t matter! But who is ever going back to anything? That’s what I want to know!” ’ [OOO, p.409] What there is to go back to is seen by Claude’s mother, his most intimate and dedicated supporter, who, for all her grief at his death, is bitterly relieved that he has not had to come back to post-war America and wake up from his ‘beautiful beliefs’. [OOO, p.458]
All the same, it is sometimes difficult to separate Claude’s beautiful beliefs from the narrator’s. One of Ours, like The Song of the Lark, was an intensely personal book: she felt as close to Claude in the years she was writing it as she had to Thea.31 The title doesn’t only denote a patriotic sentiment; it also suggests an intimate sympathy with the hero. When Claude, as a student, chooses to write a thesis on Joan of Arc, he ‘flattered himself that he had kept all personal feeling out of the paper’. [OOO, p.61] But the personal feeling comes through; and so it does in this novel. There can be no doubt that we are meant to take Claude to our hearts as Cather did those fine, brave, modest American boys she saw in New York, fresh off the Mauretania, in 1918. When Claude enlisted, ‘he believed that he was going abroad with an expeditionary force that would make war without rage, with uncompromising generosity and chivalry’. [OOO, p.248] And though he learns the realities of war from those he meets and what he sees, he does not unlearn his faith in ‘our’ American boys. At the start of ‘The Voyage of the Anchises’, the troops pull out of New York harbour cheering the Statue of Liberty and singing ‘Over There’, while a passing clergyman on a Staten Island ferry-boat takes off his hat and recites Longfellow’s ‘Sail on, O Ship of State’. No irony is intended: ‘The scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase…and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.’ [OOO, p.274] When Claude and his men encounter a distressing refugee family (Claude recoils in distaste from the raped mother’s German baby), the girl who talks to him knows that Americans are safe: ‘She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind, and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.’ [OOO, p.361] There is no getting round this as the dominant tone of One of Ours. Cather completely fails to take on the disillusioning process of the war itself (as Dos Passos and Hemingway so passionately do) or the less than ideal behaviour of the American army in France (brilliantly satirized in cummings’s the enormous room). If all that the novel were doing was presenting a heroic picture of ‘our’ noble American boys sacrificing themselves at the front for an ideal, then Mencken’s and Hemingway’s attacks on the novel would have to be the last word.
But, though One of Ours is usually described as her ‘war novel’, the war is not, in fact, its central subject. Like The Song of the Lark, with its long detailed account of Thea’s childhood and apprenticeship, the novel gives three slow first sections to the unhappy story of Claude’s Nebraskan childhood, education and marriage. It is the last time Cather would use these long-winded methods (‘The Novel Démeublé’ came out in the same year as One of Ours) but, as in The Song of the Lark, they have a point here. The Nebraskan chapters of One of Ours are as burdened with detail as Claude feels himself to be burdened, buried alive, under the weight of his life. This weight has all to be balanced by the last two sections on the ship and in France. David Daiches calls the novel ‘structurally broken-backed’.32 But she wanted33 to give the feeling of a broken world, and to point up the crucial irony of the novel, that this young American hero comes out of a civilization which is rapidly doing away with the possibilities of heroism.
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One of Ours makes a heartfelt lament for the end of the old American pioneering west:
The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square, pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more. There was still South America; perhaps he could find something below the isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it. [OOO, p.118]
Claude in Denver, bitterly feeling his own ‘wasted power’ as he looks at the statue of the famous Wild Westerner (and anticipating Cather’s own fictional moves, in work to come, from the West to the Southwest) embodies all her own national nostalgia for a lost American heroism. And this entails a loss of faith: Claude can’t feel, as Alexandra Bergson or even Jim Burden could, a spiritual relation to the land. It’s interesting to compare Cather’s wartime disillusion with that of her contemporary and admirer, Scott Fitzgerald. According to Dick Diver in Tender is the Night, the silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken. Cather thinks so too. But Dick is grieving over the end of European traditions, the long nineteenth-century ‘love story’ of empire, middle-class life, and settled hierarchies. The difference between Fitzgerald’s treatment of the war, as an American writer abroad, and Cather’s, as an American at home, is that her sense of an ending is directed at the closed pioneering frontier, not at the blowing up of the European world.
There are still some traces of the old America in One of Ours, like the old flour mill owned by Claude’s father-in-law, kept on out of sentiment ‘for there was not much money in it now’. [OOO, p.121] Claude’s childhood Bohemian friend Ernest Havel speaks a muted version of Alexandra’s conte
mplative stoicism:
‘In old countries, where not very much can happen to us…we learn to make the most of little things….Nothing is going to reach down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess.’ [OOO, p.53]
Cather’s tender feelings for Margie Anderson, the servant girl who came with the family from Virginia, are evoked in ‘simple’, illiterate, adoring Mahailey, with her scraps of stories of the Civil War, her star-embroidered quilt, her old memories of Jesse James ballads, her superstitions, and her own ways of ordering things:
She could count, and tell the time of day by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee packages. ‘That’s a big A,’ she would murmur, ‘and that there’s a little a.’ [OOO, p.22]
But the landscape is more brutal and bleak than in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Claude identifies, in retreat from it, with moonlight, which he associates with distant countries, other civilizations, and challenging adventures. It seems to him that idealists like himself, ‘children of the moon, with their unappeased longings and futile dreams’ are ‘a finer race than the children of the sun.’ [OOO, p.208]
The ‘children of the moon’ are misfits in a country which has been pasted over with a layer of philistinism and materialism. Most of the Nebraskan characters are fitted relentlessly into this cultural analysis. Claude’s aggressive, callous father, and his older brother Bayliss, censoriously hostile to anything other than commerce, are the obvious inheritors of Wick Cutter’s values. Claude’s younger brother Ralph, though slightly more engaging, is interested in nothing but machinery: the cellar of the Wheeler house is not, like Ántonia’s cellar, full of Bohemian preserves, but cast-off bits of American junk:
Mysterious objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries, old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. [OOO, p.20]
There is just a hint there that junk, once it starts ageing into antiques, might be seductive (an American writer with more entropic tendencies, like Nathanael West or Thomas Pynchon, would have loved that cellar) but, more often, junk is just pitiful, like the debris of Claude’s marital house: ‘How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed!’ [OOO, p.223] When Claude comes to the ‘dump-heap’ of the French battlefields, he has already been living in a civilization (Cather suggests) which has not needed a war to turn itself into rubbish. Claude, himself, feels like a run-down machine.
Philistine commercial values are sanctified by the kind of hypocritical, repressed domestic life that Jim Burden was already resenting in My Ántonia. The Wheeler family life is one of poisonous reticence: ‘It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have to!’ [OOO, p.44] Victor Morse comes from the same kind of background.
‘My God, it’s death in life! What’s left of men if you take all the fire out of them? They’re afraid of everything. I know them; Sunday-school sneaks, prowling around those little towns after dark!’[OOO, p.308]
The loss of manhood which the sexually adventurous Victor hints at there is spelt out in Claude’s dreary, frustrating marriage to Enid Royce. Vegetarian, pious, prohibitionist, sexually frigid, Enid is a dismal embodiment of sanctimonious mid-Western nonconformism.
Above all, Cather resented the loss of commitment to the land in the children of the pioneers.
With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it. [OOO, pp.101–2]
In this pastoral turned to junk, property becomes a dubious good. Cather had no political anxieties about the history of the white pioneers. When the nineteenth-century settlers staked their claims and homesteaded, mastering and domesticating the terrain, they did it, she felt, with some kind of moral or spiritual relationship to the land. In her version of American history (a common one, that goes from Jefferson to Robert Frost) the force of the ideal gave them inalienable rights of property. But with the replacement of ideal by commercial values in the next generation, property rights became questionable. In that context it might be better to give up the land and the whole historical idea of inheritance. Claude (who has been trapped into working his father’s land instead of studying history) is given these reflections after a conversation in the wheatfields with the hired man Dan, who explains his lukewarm harvesting techniques to him:
‘It’s all right for you to jump at that corn like you was a-beating carpets, Claude; it’s your corn, or anyways it’s your Paw’s. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a hired man’s got no property but his back, and he has to save it. I figure that I’ve only got about so many jumps left in me, and I ain’t a-going to jump too hard at no man’s corn.’ [OOO, p.79]
When self-employed shepherds become hirelings, having to sell their labour in the market-place, it is always a sign that the golden age has passed away. No political solution is offered except renunciation. ‘He often felt that he would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among strangers.’ [OOO, p.80] The choice is a trap: either a spoilt pastoral domicile, or dispossessed orphan wanderings.
Cather was not alone in her bitterness about the crushing materialism of small-town life in the mid-West. It is found in other fictions of the time, such as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). But Cather’s satire on contemporary life was especially hostile because of her powerful feeling for what had gone before.34 Claude’s quest is, thus, also the novelist’s: as The Song of the Lark acted out her struggle to fulfil her sense of a vocation, One of Ours acts out her search for a new mythology to replace the loss of the old.
The site of the new mythology is France, and Cather pours into the novel all the feelings about the country she had had since her student days of reading French literature (with Dorothy Canfield, the memory of whose friendship is a powerful influence on the book)35 and her first sightings of Paris and Provence. Claude is not the kind of character who has a ‘picture-making’36 facility, so Cather restrains herself from long descriptions of the French country, character and architecture. But she does give Claude many of her own perceptions: the pleased recognition of the cottonwood trees in the French landscape, the delight in the ‘energy and fire’ [OOO, p.356] of the French language, the spiritual satisfaction in French Gothic cathedrals. After this book she would return repeatedly to France, always using the country as a focus for her feelings about the dignity of old values, and increasingly associating those feelings with Catholicism. Though Claude does not become a Catholic in France, in his pilgrimage there he finds what he needs: idealism to replace materialism, a living for a dead language, a carefully tended pastoral existing in the very centre of the destruction. Even the cherry tree which his father brutally hacked down in his childhood orchard metamorphoses into a cherry tree in a French garden, as though giving Claude back his spoilt youth.
Claude’s new faith is expressed by David Gerhardt’s dim, vaguely pagan hopes of immortality, and by the girl Claude meets in the carefully tended garden of the convent, outside a shelled Red Cross barrack. The convent setting pays a characteristic tribute to order and tradition preserved against heavy obstacles. Values can be made to last, even if objects cannot. ‘ “This war has taught us all how little the made things matter,” ’ the girl says. ‘ “Only the feeling matters.’ ” [OOO, p.386] Claude responds with a hazy but consolatory sense that it is possible to transcend the ‘dump-heap’ of rubbish and destruction and win through to some other intangible world of value:
Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw. [OOO, p.391]
The kn
ight questing for redemption through renunciation in the waste land, and seeing beautiful visionary possibilities trembling on the horizon, derives all too manifestly from Wagner.37 Like The Song of the Lark, One of Ours yokes literal Wagnerian narrative methods to a Wagnerian leitmotif.38 Claude is meant to be like Parsifal, ‘the blameless fool by pity enlightened’ of Wagner’s last opera, who is brought up as an innocent by his mother, Herzeleide (‘Heart’s Sorrow’) and who, after discovering his identity and resisting the temptation of the seductive Kundry, at last after years of wandering heals the wound of the old King and inherits the Holy Grail. Cather had planned to call the last section ‘The Blameless Fool by Pity Enlightened’, but decided that this was too explicitly Wagnerian, and changed it to ‘Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On’, from Vachel Lindsay’s chauvinist poem to William Jennings Bryan,39 thus fleetingly identifying Claude with a lost hero of the agrarian movement. But the mythological status of her hero is still explicit. The ship he goes to France on is named after the father of Aeneas, founder of the Italian empire. Claude’s friendship with Gerhardt is sealed in a wood with trees curving like ‘the pictures of old Grecian lyres’. They might be Achilles and Patroclus – or Orpheus and Eurydice.
The possibility of reading modern destinies in terms of ancient history is underlined, half comically, by an officer in Claude’s battalion who has excavated, in Spain, the ruins of ‘one of Julius Caesar’s fortified camps’, and can talk of nothing but the Roman Emperor’s campaigns: ‘Everything was in the foreground with him; centuries made no difference.’ [OOO, p.314] When a soldier reads an item from the Kansas City Star which says that a group of British Tommies in Mesopotamia have come across what they think is the site of the Garden of Eden, a religious Swedish boy, Oscar Peterson, is outraged.