by Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize 1923
Claude Wheeler – “Now he dismissed all Christian Theology as something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned about.”
Sophistry – A subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning.
Fallacious – deceptive, misleading, containing a fallacy, logically unsound
What a beautiful book! What a writer! She can write about nature. She can write about people. She can write about war.
Claude Wheeler, Nebraska farm boy, a red-head – really wants to move to Lincoln and go to college at the Univ. Instead, he must go to a Christian college and even that is called short so he can run the family farm while Dad and younger brother Ralph go off to a ranch in Colorado. Claude is a good boy, very smart, but deeply dissatisfied. He forces himself to fall in love and marry Enid – when he really should have married Gladys. Enid is a cold-hearted goody two-shoe who really wants to go to China and be a missionary. On the train the first night of their honeymoon, she locks Claude out – claiming not to feel well. He finally gets rid of her when she does go to China to help her sick sister. Meanwhile, WWI has begun. Claude enlists and finds his calling – being a soldier in France. Gone are all the feelings of hopelessness. He is full of passion and love, for his comrades-in-arms – for the French people and country. It is trench warfare and he is the best of the best – so brave – so his unit is put at the front – the most deadly spot. He dies of 3 bullet wounds. His sweet, dear mother and his mother’s helper, Mahailey, grieve him but mother knows it was for the best.
Here is written: “He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country could ever be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with. Perhaps it was as well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would have dreaded the awakening, — she sometimes even doubts whether he could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment. One by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership, leave prematurely the world they have come back to… – one by one they quietly die by their own hand…When Claude’s mother hears of these things, she shudders and presses her hands tight over her breast, as if she had him there, she feels as if God had saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible end. For as she reads, she thinks those slayers of themselves were all so like him, they were the ones who had hoped extravagantly,–who in order to do what they did had to hope extravagantly, and to believe passionately. And they found they had hoped and believed too much. But one she knew, who could ill bear disillusion…safe, safe.”
Last few sentences: “as they are working at the table or bending over the oven, something reminds them of him, and they think of him together, like one person. Mahailey will pat her back and say, “Never you mind, Mudder; you’ll see your boy up yonder.” Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near,–but Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces, and for her He is nearer still,–directly overhead, not so very far above the kitchen stove.”
Here is when Claude is sitting in Gladys Farmer’s living room, waiting and saying goodby before his trip to Europe: “The afternoon sun was pouring in at the back windows of Mrs. Farmer’s long, uneven parlour, making the dusky room look like a cavern with a fire at one end of it. …The glass flower vases that stood about on little tables caught the sunlight and twinkled like tiny lamps. Claude had been sitting there for a long while, and he knew he ought to go. Through the window at his elbow he could see rows of double hollyhocks, the flat leaves of the sprawling catalpa, and the spires of the tangled mint bed, all transparent in the gold-powdered light.”
His mother’s love for Claude:
“She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she couldn’t bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life hard to live; he suffered so much over little things, –and she suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments. . . Her personal life was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude was concerned, she lived on another plane,–dropped into the lower air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind, passionate human feelings.
“It had always been so…His chagrins shrivelled her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something ached in her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and happened to think that he had been happy lately, she would lie softly and gratefully in her warm place.”
On the troop ship on the ocean: “When Bandmaster Fred Max asked him to play chess, he had to stop a moment and think why it was that game which had such disagreeable associations for him. Enid’s pale, deceptive face seldom rose before him unless some such accident brought it up.”
Describing an officer, Barclay Owens, who fell in love with Julius Caesar while building a dam and discovered some ruins: “Everything was in the foreground with him; centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens found out about it.”
Little girl gathering horsechestnuts – “David called to her and asked her whether they were good to eat.
“Oh, non!” she exclaimed, her face expressing the liveliest terror, “pour les cochons!”
Not included are her beautiful descriptions of nature in Nebraska and France. Birds, flowers, trees, colors, sounds. Extraordinary writer!
