Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. 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, and intense kind of pain, -- the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!
Like any American worth his salt, he is a young man of destiny, but without a proper canvas to paint it on. He can feel it, deep within him, but he can’t see it, and therefore cannot understand really what the feeling within him is.
And he is not alone. He is but one of a whole generation of young American men closed off from any frontier like the ones that had defined their fathers and grandfathers.
He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind the mountains. Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to be young; but it was a painful thing, too. He didn’t believe older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden light, the mass of mountains were splitting up into four distinct ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in perspective, one behind the other. It was a lonely splendour that only made the ache in his breast the stronger. What was the matter with him, he asked himself entreatingly. He must answer that question before he went home again.
The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square, pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more. There was still South America; perhaps he could find something below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.
Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a new country. It was a storm that dies down at last, -- but what a pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power -- for it was a kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against the ruddy light, so deep in his own struggling thoughts that he did not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped to look at him.
The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists clenched in an attitude of arrested action, -- his sandy hair, his tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known how he seemed to this stranger.
This, then, is the protagonist that Willa Cather presents to us in this, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In many ways, Claude Wheeler comes from the earthy Nebraska soil -- the way Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda do -- but he is neither enriched nor ennobled by it. For Claude, the world that birthed him is unable to nourish him, taken over, as it appears to have been, by people with a myopic understanding of destiny.
People like Claude’s brother Bayliss -- a successful businessman who has successfully navigated the contours of success in this new America in a way Claude never will. Cather has a fair amount of scorn to share for men like Bayliss Wheeler, and although she puts the following thoughts in the head of one of her characters, it isn’t hard here or throughout the novel to hear Cather’s own indictment of small-minded businessmen.
She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of strong convictions and confused figures. She believed that all things which might make the world beautiful -- love and kindness, leisure and art -- were shut up in prison, and that successful men like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys. The generous ones, who would let these things out to make people happy, were somehow weak, and could not break the bars.
But Claude does not see any of this complexity. Instead, he tries to fit himself into the world that’s presented to him. Going to school, getting a job, marrying a suitable woman -- as he struggles to fit himself into these and other windowless boxes of expectation, he is incapable of seeing the failure inherent in his attempt.
And no one can tell him. Even his soon-to-be father-in-law, and man of experience and the conquests of an earlier generation, cannot instruct Claude, cannot communicate what it is that helped him find success and which might work for Claude.
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.
It is a tragedy waiting to manifest itself. When his faux life comes apart, when his wife leaves, not him, per se, but leaves to follow her own kind of destiny as a missionary in China, much of what Claude has tried to build up around him comes tumbling down.
How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and decaying things in nature. Rubbish … junk … his mind could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued from day to day. Actions without meaning. … As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten. He wondered how he was to do on through the years ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his soul.
Cather really touched me here, because I have felt the angry weariness of life that Claude Wheeler here feels at the end of his rope. At a low point in my life, I distinctly remember looking around at all the objects that had defined me for so long and rebelling against them as the empty vessels that they were. I was able to climb out of that pit and re-establish my relationship to the world around me, but Claude will continue to struggle.
Struggle, that is, until he runs off to war.
In the novel it is the First World War -- that colossal crime against man and his highest aspirations -- but in it, Claude finds a different pattern for life than the one offered him by his parents and his community. It is a realization that comes over Claude slowly, and first in the simple process of movement, of traveling beyond the confines of the world as he thought he knew it.
Claude seemed to himself to be leading a double life these days. When we was working over Fanning, or was down in the hold helping to take care of the sick soldiers, he had no time to think, -- did mechanically the next things that came to hand. But when he had an hour to himself on deck, the tingling sense of ever-widening freedom flashed up in him again. The weather was a continual adventure; he had never known any like it before. The fog, and rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean were like something he had imagined long ago -- memories of old sea stories read in childhood, perhaps -- and they kindled a warm spot in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where childhood had left off. The ugly hiatus between had closed up. Years of his life were blotted out in the fog. This fog which had been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving one a chance to correct one’s ideas about life and to plan the future. The past was physically shut off; that was his illusion. He had already travelled a great many more miles than were told off by the ship’s log.
It erases his past and lets him begin anew. Claude senses this early on, but only comes to a concrete understanding of it near the end of the novel.
He has already been to the front, and now, in a break away from the action, Claude and his soldier friend David, who, in civilian life, is a violinist, are staying with a bucolic French family. At one point, David performs a piece with the matriarch of the family. It’s a sentimental piece for the French family -- the last piece played by Rene, a son, now lost at the front, before leaving for the war. And Claude finds himself jealous of the talent displayed.
The music was a part of his own confused emotions. He was torn between generous admiration, and bitter, bitter envy. What would it mean to be able to do anything as well as that, to have a hand capable of delicacy and precision and power? If he had been taught to do anything at all, he would not be sitting here tonight a wooden thing amongst living people. He felt that a man might have been made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it; tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied. If one were born into this world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and upset things, break and destroy, all one’s life.
He knows again that his life has been this. Unformed. And he yearns for something more. Something beautiful and tragic to aim himself at. But what? Later, after the performance, Claude and David talk.
“I guess you’ll go back to your profession, all right,” Claude remarked, in the unnatural tone in which people sometimes speak of things they know nothing about.
“Not I. Of course, I had to play for them. Music has always been like a religion in this house. Listen,” he put up his hand; far away the regular pulsation of the big guns sounded through the still night. “That’s all that matters now. It has killed everything else.”
“I don’t believe it.” Claude stopped for a moment by the edge of the fountain, trying to collect his thoughts. “I don’t believe it has killed anything. It has only scattered things.” He glanced about hurriedly at the sleeping house, the sleeping garden, the clear, starry sky not very far overhead. “It’s men like you that get the worst of it,” he broke out. “But as for me, I never knew there was anything worth living for, till this war came on. Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition.”
Did you catch that? For David, who had an ideal to his life, the war is pure destruction. It destroys everything previously worth living for. But for Claude, who has no ideal, the destructive force of the war has the opposite effect. In turning over the soil of possibility, it has revealed furrows in which Claude can plant the seeds of a new life.
And later that night, alone in bed and unable to sleep, Claude puts this difficult idea into a context he can finally understand and act on.
The intervals of the distant artillery fire grew shorter, as if the big guns were tuning up, choking to get something out. Claude sat up in his bed and listened. 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. … Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As long as that was true, and now he knew it was true -- he had come all this way to find out -- he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did he envy David. He would give his own adventure for no man’s. On the edge of sleep it seemed to glimmer, like the clear column of the fountain, like the new moon, -- alluring, half-averted, the bright face of danger.
The bright face of danger. An interesting choice of words for Cather, who has written extensively about youth and the “bright medusa.” Does facing danger then becomes Claude’s ideal, the thing worth dying for, the thing through which his own adventure can create both passion and meaning for him?
It would seem so, and I think that’s why the novel falls flat for me at the end. The war may be the thing that helped Claude understand his place in the world. But the ideals of war -- especially the First World War -- pale in comparison, not just to David’s sublime music, but even to the humble scraping together of life Claude was offered at his birth.
Rather than see heroism in Claude’s death, I’d rather view the novel’s end as a call to action for the reader. Like Claude, we all have the ability to begin our lives again, this time on our own terms. Knowing that we can die for an ideal -- and that, indeed, this is the only kind of death that makes life worth living -- we are called to make the difficult and daunting choice of determining our own ideals. I will live for this, will fight for it, and even, if necessary, die for it -- but what is it? What is the ideal that I believe is worth dying for?
At the beginning and again at the end, there no frontiers left for Claude Wheeler. But there are, and always will be for us.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
