So, I got One of Ours from a library, and it was library bound, rather old copy of the book — possibly even a first edition. Which meant it had no book cover, and no introduction, and thus I hadn’t a clue what it was about. I had some vague idea of Willa Cather of some kind of Gertrude Stein/Amy Lowell of the prairie, and was prepared to be bored out of my skull, frankly.
I was not, so three cheers for that. I think having absolutely no idea what the book was about helped me to like it — if I had known the merest hint of a fact about its plot, such as, that it concerned WWI, well then I think I like Dread P. would have been able to see what was coming pretty early. Instead all I saw early on was that Claude was going to spend the book getting kicked in the shins by life, that he was a misfit who could never be happy on the path his family, place and era had set out for him. But since all I knew about Willa Cather was she was this famous prarie writer, when Claude ended up on a troop ship to France I guess figured he’d have to go back home at some point to as to wrap up the storyline with his wife, Enid. No soap there —after Enid dashes off to Shanghai to care for her sister we never hear from her again.
It’s an awfully big thread to leave hanging loose at the end of the story (So big I’m subconsciously humming Weezer’s Sweater Song.) Or at least it would be if this were a different sort of book. But by the end of the story Cather’s plan for the book has become clear: The first two thirds of the thing, concerning Claude’s aborted university education and his misguided courtship and woeful error of a marriage, all of that is just a big set up, a way of closing off all the doors in his life so that his death in battle becomes a fulfillment, a consumation, rather than a tragedy. The book’s whole point seems to be: Claude could never have been happy in the life-trap he’s blundered his way into, so better to go out in a blaze of glory.
And you know, I don’t buy it. It’s not that I didn’t believe in the first two-thirds of the book. Cather and Wharton are the two best writers we’ve had so far, and her characterizations of Claude and his family were sharp and complex and amusing and seemed real. I believed in Claude, in his dogged, unarticulated romanticism, and believed easily how ill that quality would have served him in the world he lived in. I believed in his frustrated striving, and believed that he might try and seek a solution for his frustrations in the comforts of marriage. But what I didn’t quite buy is that, had he survived the war, he would have been doomed to the same circumstances he endured before it. I could just as easily believe that a Claude who had tasted Paris might chose it, or that he might get off the troop ship in New York harbor but not get on a train out to the plains. Hemmingway did it in circumstances not much different.
So not having spent the book dreading the inevitable ending, the ending strikes me as evitable indeed. And it makes me wonder how Cather saw it; wikipedia says large parts of the book were based on the letters of her cousin, a Nebraska boy who died in the trenches as Claude does. Read that way — as an an argument for how such a death could be noble and not wasteful — I have some sympathy for One of Ours, so sharp a portrait of Claude’s alienation does Cather paint. But I don’t think I agree.
