Plot Spoilers Below.
Title: One Of Ours
Author: Willa Cather
Number of Pages: 250
Original Published Date: 1922
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Novel): 1923
Favorite Sentence(s): “He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain, -the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it”
“Claude had come to believe that the things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to shape his destiny.”
Introduction
I don’t believe I’d ever read a novel where the beginning of the story gave no hint to how the it would end. Prior to picking up this book, its existence and story was a complete unknown to me and it kept me surprised throughout. Like most of the Pulitzer Prize winners I’ve read thus far, One Of Ours seems to have fallen from societies memory.
After reading an excerpt from the novel from its back cover, I assumed the story would revolve around a character named Claude, his life on the farm, and his interactions with its people. This summary may be accurate for the first third of the novel, but veers in a direction that I hadn’t anticipated.
Summary of Novel
Claude Wheeler is the eldest son of a wealthy family in early 1900s Nebraska. The story begins by introducing the reader to Claude and allowing us to witness the Wheeler family dynamics. He is loved by his family, in particular his mother and live-in family helper, but fears his desire for something new and different away from the farm will always be challenged since his father doesn’t approve his continuing college or changing schools. Nebraska farm life has been predestined onto Claude from birth without his approval and he is troubled with the idea that his life will be unlived and adventure will never find him. Claude wants to discover life away from everything familiar to him but is trapped by expectations and filled with a discontent he could not escape.
“What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to bed-nothing has happened.”
“Well if we’ve only got once to live, it seems like there ought to be something-well, something splendid about life, sometimes.”
As the story progressed, I got the sense that Claude had mildly accepted his sealed fate as a Nebraska farmer when he courted and later married Enid, a girl from town he went to school with. It seemed rather obvious to the reader though, that this marriage would not be a happy one for Claude. Enid was a nice, yet cold woman, who initially rejected Claude’s proposal and dreamed of joining her sister as a missionary in China. When Enid’s sister fell ill, Enid left Claude to help her sick sister with no return date discussed. Even Enid’s father tried to warn Claude against the marriage since he understood Enid was like her mother, but Claude dismissed the signs.
“He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his secret, was to live.”
“You’ll find out that pretty nearly everything you believe about life-about marriage, especially-is lies. I don’t know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they do.”
After Enid’s departure, I was curious where the story would go. Would Claude marry the girl that seemed a better match? Would he start a successful business with his farm? Without the responsibility of caring for his wife, Claude was now free to recreate his life.
None of my guesses on how the plot would progress would end up being correct. It wasn’t until the early mentions of WW1 that I began to see where Claude’s story was going. Sensing that Enid was gone and wasn’t to return, he enlisted in the U.S. Army after reading the atrocities taking place in Europe. An urgent desire to leave his safe-from-harm Nebraska land to help in the war blossomed and he was finally provided an agreeable and patriotic excuse to leave.
Claude’s New Life
Before Claude had even touched ground in Europe to fight the war, fever and death had taken over many of the young men on the ship’s voyage to France. Claude did his best to nurse his sick friend and others and was himself seemingly immune to any sickness. Although death was surrounding him, he was the happiest he had ever been and recognized that he wouldn’t want to return to the farm if he could. He loved the ocean and the possibilities that awaited him and was finally on the journey he had always imagined.
“He was enjoying himself all the while and didn’t want to be safe anywhere…The discomforts and misfortunes of this voyage had not spoiled it for him. He grumbled, of course, because others did. But life had never seemed so tempting as it did here and now.”
Once in France, he is introduced to a new culture, new friendships, and is aroused to life as he had always hoped. On their way to the battlefront, there are tragedies that strike but he also develops new relationships and never expresses a wish to be home. He doesn’t even mention or acknowledge his family again if my recollection is correct.
“He was having his youth in France. He knew that nothing like this would ever come again; the fields and woods would never again be laced over with this hazy enchantment…Life had after all turned out well for him, and everything had a noble significance. The nervous tension in which he had lived for years now seemed incredible to him…absurd and childish, when he thought of it at all. He did not torture himself with recollections. He was beginning over again.”
“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!”
As I reached the end of the story, I was hopeful for a happy ending for Claude. I wanted him to survive the war and stay to start a new life in France like he desired, but alas this novel about a young farm boy in Nebraska who sailed to Europe to fight in WW1 ended like many who experienced the war in real life. Claude left Nebraska and never returned home. He died a hero in battle. Although Claude died young, and may have lived a far longer life had he never joined the war, the tradeoff was worth it to him.
The character of Claude was an introspective, lovely young man who was searching for something more in life than just the monotony and inane repetition of his life and town. He knew he wanted more but it wasn’t until the war broke out that he found his escape.
Final Thoughts
After completing the novel, I read that the author, Willa Cather, based the character of Claude on her cousin who died in battle. It seems she mixed parts of herself into Claude, such as feelings of restlessness and dissatisfaction with the few opportunities her life was afforded.
My thought is the story of Claude mirrors close to her cousin, but that much of the inner dialogue are the author’s sentiments. In particular, Claude’s expressed views of money, his need to get away, and the desire to escape death seem to me to be the writer’s own.
Jeweled Quotes from the Novel
“His reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief difficulties had always been that he could not make himself believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that were all, then life was not worth the trouble.”
“In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A funeral, the sight of a neighbor lying rigid in his black coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape; that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay…He could not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What did it mean, that verse in the Bible, ‘He shall not suffer His holy one to see corruption’??
“With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.?
“The sound of the guns had from the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of confidence and safety; tonight he knew why. What they said was, that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had made to keep their dreams. He knew the future of the world was safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a strait-jacket,-cunning and prudence would never have it to themselves.”
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