‘One of Ours’ is Willa Cather’s 1923 Pulitzer prize winning novel that I read for the ongoing Librarything Virago group’s Great War theme read. Cather is particularly known for writing about Nebraskan frontier life, and this novel opens in the Nebraskan farming community at around the time that the First World War was starting in Europe. Claude Wheeler is the son of a successful farmer, his future on the farm, seems assured. Many of Claude’s friends and neighbours are European immigrants – several of them Germans, it is some of these friends who help to open Claude’s eyes to other possibilities in life, as he is exposed to lively family gatherings, and people who love the arts. Claude is certain that there is more to life than the world he sees around him on his father’s farm. “Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.”Attending a small religious college, rather than the State College he had set his sights on, Claude is dissatisfied with the future he sees ahead of him. As the war in Europe takes hold Claude his mother and Mahailey, who works for them, eagerly pore over newspapers carrying the latest bulletins. When Claude’s father hands over responsibility of the farm to Claude, he feels a terrible weight of responsibility, the errors he makes along the way depress him out of all proportion. Claude’s sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment only increases when he rashly marries the local miller’s daughter Enid. Having built a lovely new house for himself and Enid, Claude tries to settle down to the life of a Nebraskan farmer. However Enid is far more interested in prohibition work, quietly envying her sister’s missionary work in China, than she is in either her new husband or their home, leaving him to eat a cold supper while she goes off to meetings in town. When news arrives that Enid’s sister is sick, she rushes off to China to help – leaving her new husband to move back to the family farm house with his mother. What Claude sees as his abandonment by his young wife, embarrasses him, Claude imagines the entire community must surely be talking about his situation. By this time America has finally entered the war, and this gives Claude his chance, his chance to finally do something. At a time when very few khaki clad men have yet to be seen around the small Nebraskan town where he is known – Claude is quick to join up. Initially used to train other men, Claude is eventually on his way to France in the summer of 1917 – aboard a ship struck down by the dreadful flu epidemic. Claude assists with the treatment of his stricken men, and revels in an unexpected sense of freedom and usefulness. Arriving in France with their numbers hugely depleted Claude and his comrades find a France heavily scarred by three years of war. The trenches await them, and Claude and his friends are soon caught up in the horrors of trench warfare.I have read that Cather’s depictions of war have been criticised even accused of being too positively portrayed – I find that hard to understand, for me at least, Cather’s descriptions are always vivid – her characters realistic and very human. I found Willa Cather’s France of that last year of war a place where war had become a way of life. Where people had already paid the price of war again and again, and where fresh young American soldiers arriving, with limited French at their disposal, have to quickly learn the ways of war and what it means, while living alongside the local people. “One night he dreamed that he was at home, out in the ploughed fields, where he could see nothing but the furrowed brown earth, stretching from horizon to horizon. Up and down it moved a boy, with a plough and two horses. At first he thought it was his brother Ralph; but on coming nearer he saw it was himself, and he was full of fear for this boy. Poor Claude, he would never, never get away; he was going to miss everything! While he was struggling to speak to Claude, and warn him, he awoke.” Claude Wheeler’s sense of disillusionment leads him to make the decisions he does and ultimately take him to the battlefields of France. The ending is necessarily poignant, how could it be otherwise – and give much food for thought. ‘One of Ours’ is a beautifully written novel; I especially loved the longer section set in Nebraska. Cather is adept at beautiful descriptions of the rural landscape she knew so well, and in her memorable characters, are the mix of people that made up those communities. This may not be my favourite Willa Cather (I will only know which that is, when I have read more) but it is a fascinating novel – which is about far more than America’s involvement in World War One.
1923 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.[return][return]I ve lived in Nebraska and know well the rolling landscape, the hard-working but easy-going people who farm and ranch the land there. Willa Cather s prose, as far as I m concerned, reflects perfectly their characters. That is the first impression that a reader takes away from One of Ours. And its protagonist, Claude Wheeler, reminds me of young people I ve met there, who love their state and their families, but somehow don t quite fit in. While Cather was writing about the turn of the 20th century, the story could indeed have taken place over 50 years later.[return][return]Claude s pragmatic father doesn t see the necessity, for a farmer, of too much education. Thus, Claude has to forego completing his college degree, and forsaking he friends, much different from those at home, he s made in Lincoln. His mother, a more or less fundamentalist Christian (although the movement itself within Christianity hadn t yet begun), is quite sensitive to Claude s moods and aspirations; her emotional pain on behalf of her son is almost physical. Claude, as would be expected of a young man his age, marries only to have his wife go to China to help her sister. His emotional desolation is nearly complete; he wonders if that s all there is to life getting up in the morning, working, going to bed at night. It may satisfy friends his age who ask nothing better than to farm their own land, but Claude longs for something more what, he s not sure but something.[return][return]Then World War I erupts in Europe. Claude and his mother follow the war through the newspapers and maps they pore over together. When the United States enters the war, Claude enlists and finds his place in the world.[return][return]Cather describes the effect of the war on France and its people. She also writes about little-known facts, such as the toll sickness took of the soldiers on the way over, many dying from pneumonia. She has interesting details about what it was like for the soldiers to live under wartime conditions bathing in polluted water in shell holes was a nice touch. There is some description not much of the fighting but it fits in with her story. Clearly she was more interested in what happened to the people, both French and the Allied soldiers, than she was in the details of the fighting itself.[return][return]The last pages are heart-rendering; the impact is enormous. I think you have to be a stone to be unmoved.[return]For a relatively short book 371 pages in my edition, One of Ours is beautifully evocative of a time, a place, and a young man s successful search for himself. One of the best of the early Pulitzer winners.
Do You like book One Of Ours (2008)?
Willa Cather's novel about a young Nebraskan who finds himself during WWI, One of Ours, was a pleasant discovery for me, for Cather had the great gift of being able to write beautifully and tell a good story, something done (mostly) to good effect in this novel, which won her a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Claude Wheeler is a sensitive, idealistic young man, alienated from his parents, family, and his home town, even while still loving it. He yearns for something more, but doesn't know what this should be. He gets married, hoping this will help cure this longing, but his wife turns out not really to love him very much, and goes off to China to do missionary work soon after they are married. It is only when the Great War breaks out that he finally finds a cause he can embrace and be swept up in.The book resonated with me partly for personal reasons, and it was great to make the discovery of Cather's writing, which I had never really been interested in before. From what I know of her novels, the theme of a sensitive, talented individual who has to find themselves by leaving their home, sounds like a running theme in her work. This certainly isn't a WWI novel to me, at any rate (I bought it from the store in the WWI museum in Kansas City). I also think this is not her best work, mainly because of the last section of the book, which deals with his war experience. Not that it felt artificial or anything, but the union of the aesthetic and the dramatic which so characterized the earlier parts of the novel, seemed to come unraveled to me in the last part. I felt like the story should have ended with the war, but she seemed to want to add a coda to it, to make her theme more clear, which it did, but it seemed to lessen the effect of the storytelling at the very end. Still, this is a fine work, and it makes me excited to read her other novels which are more highly regarded than this. If this is only one of her merely good novels, I imagine her "greatest" works must be something else.
—Darrick Taylor
I always forget how much I love Willa Cather until I start reading one of her books; they are always so satisfying, and this one is no exception. Part of my "Great War" reading list for the year, it is about a young man on a farm in Nebraska who is dissatisfied with his life. He knows that there is a huge world out there, ready to explore, with lots of glitteringly glamorous people--brilliant artists, intellectuals, etc.--but he chooses to marry and stay in his small world. (His "marriage" is rather off-putting...the less said by me, the better.)So, of course, he goes off to war. And we know how all this ends, but it's the journey that's the thing. Cather's writing seems old-fashioned--okay, IS old-fashioned--but it's always so rich and wonderful. This may not be my favorite of hers--that would be My Mortal Enemy--but this novel (a Pulitzer Prize winner, by the way) is worth every minute of your time.
—Leslie
"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." A mother's love for a distressed son. A son's love for his emotionally-abused and pious mother. A young man pondering life and what it has to offer. A war that has to be fought. A protagonist who feels the pull of duty to a war that summons American lives. If this is not a book about the inner turmoils of war and one's psychological battle with life, I don't know what is.The "trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon," this is what haunts Claude. As usual, Cather gives us a portrait of American landscape and personality, with World War I as a complementary backdrop. With male antipathy elucidated, this novel placed me within Claude's centermost thoughts, as he questioned what he deemed his lack of contribution to life, and his timidity as it related to his parents: He sneered at himself for his lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself, he could take up a case and fight for it. He could not assert himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough with the rest of the world. When we consider the brave men and women who go off to war, we consider the many factors that contribute to their decisions; it takes determination, drive, and perhaps some psychological factor that sets these individuals apart from the rest of us - this is what Cather seems to be exploring in this Pulitzer-prize-winning novel. The debris of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and decaying things in nature. Rubbish, junk...his mind could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued from day to day...he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten. This is a slow-moving psychological journey I made with Claude: from naive young farmer, to worldly soldier and man. Although it takes some time to get going, the first half of the book is appealing, when the Nebraska landscape seems to move with Claude's inner thought. Disillusioned, he wonders whether the farming life is the life for him, especially since he craves the intellectual lives of his friends, the Elriches: Could it really be he, who was airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his mind were associated only with the printed page. The last part of the novel was a disconcerting and painful read, as death was encapsulated. Although I wasn't always in concert with the war scenes and the subplots within the major war plot, I was always alongside Claude, so imagine my disappointment when he became the exemplification of disquietude. It's not too often that a main character draws you close to him and then abandons you for death; however, I rested assured that even in death, Claude found meaning in life. Safety and security weren't his goals, instead, he wanted his life to be a contribution to some cause greater than himself: To be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep, was like being assured of a decent burial. Safety, security; if you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to them.
—Cheryl
