Willa Cather: One of Ours

I’m a huge fan of the fiction of Willa Cather. For many years, though, I’ve avoided reading her early, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours. I’d heard that it was a jingoistic hymn to World War I, whitewashing the violence and pointlessness of that bloodbath. I happen to find a copy of the book on sale recently, and decided to give it a chance, since the centenary of the start of that war is approaching, and World War I has been on my mind. I found out that the novel is much more complex and interesting than I had heard.

Photo of Willa Cather by Edward Steichen

The main character of One of Ours, Claude Wheeler, is the strapping son of a Nebraska grain farmer in a town where his family ranks among the leading citizens. Claude grows up at a time that is somewhat familiar politically—his state is split between an aggressive Christian fundamentalist movement and liberal free thinkers, epitomized in the book by the Erlich family, who live in Nebraska’s college town of Lincoln.

Interestingly, the Erlich sons, who are part of the progressive trend, play football. At the time this book takes place, about 100 years ago, colleges were transitioning from divinity schools to a more science and liberal arts oriented curriculum. Football at that time was a rebellion against the otherworldliness of religious studies. Claude is the star player for a very bad football team, half-heartedly fielded by the only college his parents will pay for, a religious school dominated by a prissy and egotistical minister whom Cather scathingly portrays in the novel.

After college, Claude returns to the farm town where he grew up, and is caught in a trap. The only girl in town he can marry is Enid Royce, who is bright, but swept up in the fundamentalist craze. Her interests in life are to ban alcohol consumption and become a Christian missionary in China. Prohibition does actually pass in Nebraska during the course of the novel, and Enid runs off to China to take care of her ailing sister, who is already a missionary.

Claude becomes a surprisingly existential figure for a Nebraska farm boy. He yearns for some larger meaning or connection in his life. When the United States is drawn into World War I, Claude immediately enlists.

Cather does portray much of the suffering in World War I. The episodes on the boat over to France, where the young recruits are devastated by the deadly flu epidemic before they even arrive in Europe, are particularly poignant. The action in the trenches at the front is sometimes very graphic and violent, but in the end, Cather leaves the reader with a sense that the war was mostly a good thing, even for the men who died so horribly young. She even suggests that the U.S. military had given rise to a new, selfless breed of adventurer.

Reinforcing this view, an appealing, young Frenchwoman describes to Claude her memory of U.S. soldiers returning from a major battle: “I was in Paris on the fourth day of July, when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your national fête, and I said to myself as they came on, That is a new man.… As Claude looked at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost like a gift of prophecy.”

One might reasonably ask what good it is to be a new man who is slashed to bits by shrapnel. But for Cather, coming from the confining life of small town Nebraska, any exposure to the more sophisticated ways of the continent seemed worth the price. Ultimately, One of Ours is not about the glories of war, but about the necessity for a life that has more juice to it than the religiosity and gossip of Main Street U.S.A.

Other posts about Willa Cather: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 3
A Writer Moves West, Part 3: Intimate History

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Visiting Hearst Castle

I’ve wanted to visit Hearst Castle since I first saw the movie Citizen Kane in college. Not that Citizen Kane is exactly based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the man who built the castle. But close enough.

Hearst Castle

I arrived at the castle grounds yesterday, on a perfect California December day. The view up and down the coast was clear, and I could see why Hearst would pick such a remote site to build his largest residence. There are few spots in the world as scenic and mild-climated as the California coastline.

I was surprised that I couldn’t drive right up to the castle. You have to park at the visitor’s center, at the foot of the mountain where the castle is perched. You can glimpse the structures way at the crest of the coastal range in the distance, sitting like a Gaudí fantasy. That theme-park aura only intensified when the shuttle bus driver told us about the zebra and other animals that still roam the hills, left over from Hearst’s private zoo. An aoudad mountain goat did charge across the road on the way down. I wouldn’t want to drive those switchbacks without guardrails, and I kept wondering if any cars had ever rolled over the side after a night of partying at the castle.

The mansion itself is strikingly like a cathedral, but mixed in with the very pagan statuary of buff gods and goddesses, and the distinctly sporty flavor of the pools and tennis courts.

the Neptune pool

The interior Grand Rooms are lavish but rather fussy, featuring lots of carved wood ceilings and choir stall paneling brought twig by twig from the continent, seat of culture, at least in the mind of an American tycoon of the 1920s and 30s. I did enjoy the elaborate tile work in the exterior courtyards.

paving tiles in an exterior courtyard

What’s intriguing to me is how completely different this house is from the palaces of the East Coast magnates, such as the Roosevelts’ Hyde Park residence, or J.P. Morgan’s home in New York, which conform to a stuffed-armchair ideal of good taste, much more European. Hearst Castle is not in good taste. It’s a hodgepodge of classical, renaissance, and gothic. The artwork is a mélange of Spanish, French, Mexican, Flemish, Italian, and Greek. (One can imagine architect Julia Morgan biting her tongue at some of her client's choices.) The private movie theater has art deco caryatids holding branches of lights.

light fixtures in the movie theater

Hearst Castle is distinctly Californian in its idiosyncratic features and its defiance of decorum. It’s no surprise that the lady who presided there at Hearst’s side was not usually his wife, but the movie actress Marion Davis, who was his mistress.

Marion Davies

A Hollywood crowd often filled the guest rooms at the castle, including Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable.

I’m not saying that bad taste is a virtue, but there’s something refreshing and original about the mix at the Hearst Castle. Only a bold mind would have created with architect Julia Morgan the two pools: the Neptune Pool for outdoor swimming, and the Roman Pool for indoor, with its dark blue and gold tiles covering every inch, from the deep end of the water to the ceiling.

the Roman pool

I’m not defending Hearst’s politics and his active campaigning through his newspapers for the United States to enter the Spanish-American War. But I do find his castle surprisingly likeable, in its own naïve and earnest way.

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Is the Detroit Institute for Arts Collection For Sale?

A story in the November 5, 2013, edition of the New York Times describes an appraisal that a major auction house did of the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, a city-owned museum. In order to pay off its creditors, the city of Detroit, in bankruptcy court, is seriously considering selling off its world-class art collection, an unprecedented step for a U.S. museum. The Detroit Institute of Arts owns some of Diego Rivera’s greatest murals, painted specifically for the museum. Other works in the collection include Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s celebrated The Wedding Dance, a stunning self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh in a yellow straw hat and cornflower blue shirt, and Henri Matisse’s The Wild Poppies in stained glass.

The Rivera Court in the Detroit Institute of Arts

The city of Detroit is $18 billion dollars in debt. Even the pensions of its municipal workers are being considered for cuts, according to a ruling this week by a federal judge. Selling off works of art might seem like a rational way to ease the deficit. According to the article in the Times, “Some of Detroit’s largest creditors have contended in court that the museum’s collection is not an essential city asset and should be sold to help pay those who are owed money.”

But what is an “essential city asset” if not the works of art that generations of Detroit citizens have grown up knowing and loving? A painting or a sculpture that you visit regularly in a museum becomes almost like a friend. Its removal or disappearance is not a trivial event.

The Detroit Institute of Arts commissioned Diego Rivera to paint the series of murals in the museum in 1932. Rivera chose the theme of Detroit Industry for the cycle of paintings. He spent a month at the Ford Motor Company’s plant in Dearborn, Michigan, sketching and planning the murals, a tribute to local technology. Many of the portraits in the murals depict residents of the Detroit area, including a museum guard and gardener, and a Ford engineer. Taking these murals out of Detroit would deprive these artworks of much of their historical setting and context.

Even if the Detroit Institute of Arts sells off most of the collection that can be auctioned, estimates of what it would net range from $452 million to $2.5 billion, only a fraction of Detroit’s debt. 

We have to consider as a country what are priorities are. Do we support keeping great works of art accessible to the public, and maintaining the pensions of lifelong public servants, or do we continue to spend two-thirds of a trillion dollars each year on military expenditures? It’s possible we've reached the point where we have to choose.

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