Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.
The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:
“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”
But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.
I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.
The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.
This was the first Cather I read and it certainly made me want to read more – I have also been stockpiling so I really should get back to her! I agree the London section is weakest but I didn’t know she’d disowned it. I thought it was pretty good, and obviously she grew in strength from there.
I enjoyed the London bit because of knowing London so well, but tend to agree. I read and reviewed this in 2013 (and who did I give it to? Was it you?) but amusingly remember not one detail of the other book I reviewed alongside it! https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/book-reviews-73/
This one really isn’t as good as her other books – she writes the book she thinks she should write rather than the book she should write. But it’s still well worth reading, because it’s Willa Cather. She’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve read a lot of her books, although not all of them. She is able to write about the wide open skies and the clear air of the Great Plains/Southwest better than any author aside from Wallace Stegner.
I’m reading Wharton’s first novel right now, which is a piece of historical fiction set in Italy of all places. I feel like the impulse behind it must have been similar to the impulse behind Alexander’s Bridge – the desire of a new writer to write a book wholly outside of her personal experience. Strangely, though, both Cather and Wharton are at their best when they are writing closer to the bone of their own lives.
Like Madame B, I have tons of Cather stockpiled, including this, but somehow never get to it. I think I’ve actually read one novel, which I liked very much, and I have heard good things about this one.
This was my first Willa Cather read and I enjoyed it, but not as much as the ones I have read since then. I read one review which said that Alexander’s Bridge was the best fictional account of a man suffering from depression that they had read, but that’s not something that I know anything about.
Hmm, I’ve read quite a bit of Cather, and I never heard of this one.
Damn you… yet another author to look up!
Someone gave me this book after I had a son called Alexander! I’d forgotten all about that till this moment, but it’s quite a neat idea, though you couldn’t be worrying too much about what happens to the character with that name. I mean, you’d want to be clear you weren’t predicting anything about the baby. Anyway, next time someone I know has a child I might try to match a book for the parents.
I see from my records that I didn’t actually read it till a good few years later, but then did enjoy it. My favourite of hers is always The Lost Lady.
Thanks, I had not heard of this one.
Chris at https://chriswolak.com/ formerly wildmoobooks is THE Willa Cather specialist. Through her, I recently heard about Shadows on the Rock, another book by Cather I had never heard of, on Quebec. Sounds really good