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The Bohemian Girl
by Willa Cather
Harper Perennial
2009, Paperback
First collection? No.
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Born in 1873, Willa Cather moved to Nebraska aged nine; this frontier country remain a constant throughout her work, which includes the novels O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. She died in 1947.
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"It’s
an old saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two to
death before they get broken in to the country. They are tempted by the
great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of
something."
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rutherford-Johnson
Cather writes about immigrants, the building blocks of the brave new
world cast adrift in magnificently described landscapes; thwarted
artists and lost souls yearning for freedom from a pitiless existence
or sometimes just their own nature. Harper Perennial's funkily
repackaged introduction to her short stories is coupled with a "bonus"
story by a new writer – in this case Lydia Pelle's Kidding Season,
a thoughtful tale of a lost soul of a runaway trapped on a
drought-stricken farm that was an effective counterpoint to Cather's
evocations of the bleak and beautiful American West.
Eric Hermannson's Soul
centres on a Norwegian "of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
of anything but ice and the devil" who is lost in "an arid soil and
under a scorching sun". Eric must decide between the pitiless comfort
of salvation by a harsh and puritanical sect and the giddy temptation
of one night of music and the fey Margaret Elliot, as trapped and
lonely in the salons of New York as he is in the West. The story offers
no false comfort or romantic resolution. Instead it coolly dissects the
couple's passion, examining it through each of their points of view to
ask whether such feelings, no matter how intensely felt, can ever be
enough.
A Wagner Matinee
also asks if it is really a good idea for artistic urbanites to succumb
to passion – a particularly pertinent one for a female writer. The
narrator's Aunt Georgiana threw away a career at the Boston
Conservatory to marry a Nebraskan farm boy. Fifty years later, she
revisits Boston for the first time and her fond nephew treats her to a
concert. Aunt Georgiana's passion for her husband is long since spent.
Wagner's music, gloriously described, re-awakens her artistic passion
but far from being a comfort this only reminds her of everything she
has lost.
Art may be salvation, but it is not to be taken lightly. Cather's art
is a terrible, blinding force that can destroy as well as save. In Paul's Case a
young man steals from his employer to fund a week of hedonistic and
aesthetic excess. However, this longed for access to a different world
is not enough to redeem Paul: the money runs out and he is left alone
and helpless to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Art, according to Cather, goes hand in hand with freedom or, more
accurately, escape.
The Sculptor's Funeral
recounts the wake of a talented artist whose dead body is returned to
the brutish, uncomprehending family, who accounted his artistic fame an
embarrassment. Yet the story's message is interestingly complicated. On
the one hand, the sculptor never truly escaped at all, here he is
brought back at the last to be reviled by his family once more – yet
despite this, there were people who understood him and continue to
defend him. And his art lives on, apart from him.
The theme is explored most satisfyingly in The Bohemian Girl.
Nils Ericson, a roaming musician, returns to his wealthy farming
family, his indominatable mother, his timid yearning cousin, Eric, and
the wild restless Clara Vavrika, now married to Nils' brother. The
first part of the story deals with Nils' wooing of Clara and her
decision of whether to risk giving up her comfortable life for love and
a roving life. However, it is the coda that was the most striking
aspect of this story for me, showing a writer unafraid to explore
difficult themes. A year later, a joyous Nils sends money to his little
cousin Eric so that he too can flee.
But what is right is salvation for one might be death to another. Eric
is made of different stuff to his adventurous cousin and escape is not
so straightforward to him – he is too aware of everything he would have
to give up. This is the place where Cather chooses to end her story –
not on triumphant escape or a romantic tryst but on a young man's
contradictory, compromised and yet satisfying decision. Life is made up
of terrible choices, Cather's stories reiterate over and over – there
are no easy answers but the most terrible thing of all is not to
choose.
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