“Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On…”
One of Willa Cather’s lesser novels, One of Ours strikes a balance between idealism and patriotism. In truth, it contains two distinct stories told across five divided parts in the novel: Book I “On Lovely Creek,” Book II “Enid,” Book III “Sunrise on the Prairie,” Book IV “The Voyage of the Anchises,” Book V “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On.” The title of Book V is taken from a Vachel Lindsay poem which is also featured at the outset of the novel (Vachel Lindsay was the self-described “singing poet” of Chicago, Illinois).
The first half of One of Ours focuses on life in rural Franklin, Nebraska (Southern Nebraska) in the early 20th century. It tells the story of a restless young man named Claude Wheeler, whose father is a successful Nebraska farmer and a member of the early empire-building class of pioneers. His mother is a devoutly pious Christian woman. However, his father’s success has left Claude feeling purposeless. Claude is sent to college at a Christian school, Temple College, only to eventually transfer to the State University in Lincoln, where he thoroughly enjoys his studies but still feels out of place. He is forced to return home when his father launches a new ranching venture in Colorado, and despite some initial hesitations, he grants Claude permission takes over management of the Wheeler Ranch in Nebraska. Claude soon strikes up a romance with a local girl named Enid Royce, she cares for him while he recovers from an illness, and they are eventually married, despite having grown emotionally distant from one another after Claude recovered. In time, Enid grows enamored with the temperance movement, women’s issues, and international Christian missionary work. She decides to leave Nebraska to care for her ill-ridden sister, a missionary in China. From this point on, Enid disappears entirely from Claude’s life and again he feels lost.
The second half of the book changes the whole tone of the novel. Claude and his mother listen intently as news reaches their small rural community of the outbreak of World War I. After Germany invades France, Claude enlists and he is sent across the ocean in a ship entitled the Anchises. On the voyage to Europe, many men die from diseases, and Claude befriends a doctor. Upon arrival, Claude is utterly amazed at the culture and architecture of Europe, though he does not partake in the sexual escapades of his companions with French women. In these scenes, Willa Cather beautifully describes European towns as the soldiers march onward, making it seem as though the war is the youthful adventure of a lifetime for a restless Nebraska boy. The novel builds to a crescendo as Claude’s unit closes in on “the Hun” and “Fritz.” They move through town after town encountering various ambushes, and losing men along the way. We are given a memorably intense scene in which Claude’s unit takes the town of Beaufort, where German soldiers lie in wait. Eventually Claude’s unit reaches the front and, as readers, we experience the stench and mutilation of bodies piled up, a hideous reflection of the monstrosities of trench warfare. Claude is tasked with holding the line, where he and his compatriots are all quickly and unceremoniously shot to pieces. Claude dies in battle, but curiously Willa Cather almost praises Claude’s death as if it is the cure to his restlessness. In the closing chapter of the novel, we return to Franklin, Nebraska where life continues unabated and unmolested by the troubles of the world. Claude’s mother receives a phone call that her son has been killed in battle and she privately grieves.
One Of Ours forces us to ask: Where does the pioneering spirit go when the frontier vanishes? Where can a young man go when his life is entirely provided for him? Willa Cather bids us to answer: the “eagles of the west fly on” in search of new frontiers, hailing new means conquest. The story of Claude Wheeler is akin to a tragedy, as the American dream –the farm, the family, and the marriage– is simply not satisfying for him. The full extension of Claude’s life is only realized when he faces death on the frontline in battle against the Germans. In this respect, One of Ours is a vainglorious novel in praise of a patriotic and heroic death in battle –a marked contrast from the more nuanced works of Ernest Hemingway or Ford Madox Ford. Apparently, Willa Cather based the character of Claude Wheeler on a mixture of herself and her cousin, who lived on a neighboring farm in Nebraska, and who was killed in Cantigny, France in 1918 (Cather explained as much in a letter to fellow novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher –Fisher was regularly considered for the Pulitzer Prize in its early years, but she never won).
Notable Quotations
“Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed” (opening lines).
“The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, -a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the south section of the big Wheeler Ranch” (Book I, Chapter I, pp.4).
“As for him, perhaps he would never go home at all. Perhaps, when this great affair was over, he would buy a little farm and stay here for the rest of his life. That was a project he liked to play with. There was no chance for the kind of life he wanted at home, where people were always buying and selling, building and pulling down. He had begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow emotions” (Book V, Chapter XIII, pp. 327-328).
“When the survivors of Company B are old men, and are telling over their good days, they will say to each other, “Oh that week we spent at Beaufort!” They will close their eyes and see a little village on a low ridge, lost in the forest, overgrown with oak chestnut and black walnut…buried in autumn colour, the streets drifted deep in autumn leaves, great branches interlacing over the roofs of the houses, wells of cool water that tastes of moss and tree roots. Up and down those streets they will see figures passing; themselves, young and brown and clean-limbed; and comrades, long dead, but still alive in that far-away village. How they will wish they could tramp again, nights on days in the mud and rain, to drag sore feet into their old billets at Beaufort! To sink into those wide feather beds and sleep the round the clock while the old women washed and dried their clothes for them; to eat rabbit stew and pommes frites in the garden, -rabbit stew made with red wine and chestnuts. Oh, the days that are no more!” (Book V Chapter XVII pp. 349-350).
About The 1923 Pulitzer Prize Decision
One Of Ours was Cather’s most heavily criticized novels, much of it coming from other writers who were disappointed in its romantic portrayal of war. Sinclair Lewis –obviously no fan of the Pulitzer Prizes– praised the early chapters of One of Ours which depict life in rural Nebraska, but he witheringly lambasted the second half of the novel. H.L. Mencken also savagely attacked the novel. Ernest Hemingway –whose novels often portray the bleak and demoralizing affects of modern warfare– also found the novel to be an untrue account of battle (he accused Cather of simply plagiarizing from the heavily dramatized scenes in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously controversial film The Birth of a Nation). Even Cather’s close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, regarded One of Ours as a betrayal of the realities of war. One Of Ours has frequently been compared to John Dos Passos Three Soldiers, though the latter arguably paints a more brutally honest picture of a soldier’s life.
As such, the Novel Jury in 1923 only begrudgingly awarded the prize to Willa Cather. In his jury report submitted to Frank Fackenthal, chairman Jefferson B. Fletcher wrote that the selection was made “without enthusiasm” and that “We are of the opinion that Miss Cather’s novel, imperfect as we think it in many respects, is yet the most worthwhile of any in the field.”
The three Novel Jury members in 1923 were:
- Chair: Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- To the best of my knowledge, Samuel M. Crothers (1857-1927) was a Unitarian minister. He resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Bliss Perry (1860-1954) was born into a well-connected Massachusetts family (his brother was the headmaster at Phillips Exeter Academy) and he was educated at Williams College before teaching at Princeton and Harvard for many years. He taught at the University of Paris and served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He was a prominent literary critic and wrote extensively on American poetry, including a notable biography of Walt Whitman. He died in 1954 at the age of 93, he was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson, among other notable leaders.
Who Is Willa Cather?
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia in 1873 as Wilella Cather (I recently learned from watching old episodes of The Dick Cavett Show that the name Cather was actually pronounced with a hard “th” sound as in “rather”). At age 10, her family moved to the Nebraska prairie, eventually landing in Red Cloud, Nebraska where most of her celebrated novels would later be set. Later going by the name “Willa,” she graduated from the University of Nebraska and worked in newspapers and as a teacher. When she was young she went through a period of dressing in masculine garb. She cut her hair short for a time, and preferred the name “William,” but she eventually shrugged off this sense of self as she got older. This revelation has led to a flurry of anachronistic scholars searching for what may have been her true identity in the modern sense. We may only speculate about what Cather’s true feelings may have been. It is true, however, that most of her close friends were women –such as Sarah Orne Jewett, a regional American novelist and short story writer– and she lived for 39 years with her editor and domestic partner, Edith Lewis. Were they lovers? Documents of the era describe them simply as close friends and travel companions. More recent intrigue has failed to unearth anything solid that would suggest they were romantically linked, but when piecing together her whole life, it is hard to imagine Willa Cather as anything other than homosexual (or at least she was almost certainly not heterosexual). Perhaps a more pertinent question to ask is why so many of us today are so intensely driven to dig into an intensely private woman’s life –a writer who was almost assuredly gay– in search of concrete proof one way or the other. Ambiguity seems to have been Willa Cather’s own preference, and perhaps that should suffice for those of us who greatly admire her work.
At any rate, Cather first published poetry and short stories, but after the publication of her debut novel, Alexander’s Bridge in 1912, she became entirely devoted to writing novels, publishing O Pioneers! in 1913, The Song of the Lark in 1915, My Antonia in 1918, and Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in 1947. Willa Cather never married and had no children; her literary executorship fell to her long-time companion Edith Lewis. And when she died in 1972, it was passed to Cather’s nephew, Charles Cather, who died in 2011.
Cather burned most of her personal correspondences throughout her lifetime, and upon her death, her will expressly forbade any quotation or reprinting of her personal writings. However after the deaths of her last literary executors in 2013, a series of Willa Cather’s surviving letters were published. Despite considerable anticipation in the literary community, her correspondences actually revealed very little about her personal life, or at least very little that might titillate the modern scholar. However, according to an article penned by Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times in 2013, the letters do “make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women.” Following Cather’s death, Edith Lewis penned a straightforward biography of Cather entitled Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, and this book also contains nothing that would point one way or the other regarding the elusive question of Cather’s sexuality. Lewis did, however, destroy Cather’s final unfinished novel at her request. Today, a prairie in Webster County, Nebraska is named after Willa Cather.
Film Adaptation:
None.
Further Reading:
- O Pioneers! (1913)
- Book I of Willa Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy” (also called the “Great Plains Trilogy”).
- The Song of the Lark (1915)
- Book II of Willa Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy” (also called the “Great Plains Trilogy”).
- My Ántonia (1918)
- Book III of Willa Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy” (also called the “Great Plains Trilogy”).
- Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Literary Context in 1922-1923:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1922): awarded to Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benavente (1866–1954) “for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama.”
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel was If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis came in at the #10 spot.
- Franz Kafka began intensive work on his novel The Castle at the mountain resort of Spindlermühle, but he ceased around early September in mid-sentence.
- James Joyce Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
- Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and Clive Bell were hosted by English art patron and novelist Sydney Schiff to dine in Paris at the Hotel Majestic –this unique moment was the one joint meeting of these luminaries.
- D. H. and Frieda Lawrence migrated from Europe to the United States.
- The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald was officially published in book form.
- “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in The Smart Set magazine. Later, his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.
- Over one night at his home in Shaftsbury, Vermont, Robert Frost completed the poem “New Hampshire” and at sunrise he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”.
- T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster stayed together in the country with Virginia Woolf where they discussed James Joyce’s Ulysses.
- Ernest Hemingway’s manuscripts were infamously stolen in Paris.
- T. S. Eliot founded The Criterion magazine, with the first appearance of his poem “The Waste Land.”
- The first Newbery Medal for authors of distinguished children’s books was awarded by the American Library Association.
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
As a great admirer of Willa Cather, I am delighted to see her honored with a Pulitzer Prize, however One of Ours is undeniably one of her lesser works. I much prefer her novels of the Great Plains (like the passages featured in the first half of One of Ours) but a worthwhile secondary choice for the Pulitzer Prize in in 1923 in my view would have been The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Indeed, I likely would have chosen the latter.
Cather, Willa. One Of Ours. Vintage Classics, November 5, 1991 (originally published in 1922).
Hello: I am working on a paper for a conference on the 1923 Cather novel “One of Our’s and was hoping you would contact me about that. Thanks, Mitchell Egber
Hi Mitchell: I cannot claim to be an expert but happy to help if I can. You can reach me via email on my “about me” page.