Ripening Claude: Willa Cather's One of Ours and the Philosophy of Henri Bergson

When Willa Cather published One of Ours in 1922, she set off a debate over the novel's relative sophistication that became more rigid with each passing decade. Although the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and found many admiring readers who wept over the death of Claude Wheeler, some of Cather's famous contemporaries mocked her "sentimentality." By the century's end, critics unwilling to accept the novel's apparent endorsement of war claimed to discover irony. Claude was a dupe, they argued, a victim of his own naïveté. Along the way, a few readers suspected that the novel was more complex than this. Steven Trout provides the departure point for a new generation of criticism by explaining that "the text engages the reader in a complex and unsettling analysis."¹ In the essay that follows, I argue that this "analysis" is rooted in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Inspired by this popular French philosopher, Cather neither endorses nor undermines her hero. Instead, she seems to be exploring a question that captivated the industrialized world in the aftermath of World War I: how can a human being evolve authentically in a mechanistic age?²

From the first, Cather's most influential readers directed attention elsewhere. Mencken, Lewis, Hemingway, and Wilson saw the work as a failed attempt to sentimentalize war.³ Hemingway's infamous letter to Wilson neatly illustrates the line of thinking: "Then look at One of Ours. Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the war weren't you?"⁴ Cather, in the words of Cooperman, was leaning "upon the stereotypes of war rhetoric."⁵ In sum, the novel was about war, which no woman could ever fathom. The flaws in this approach are, of course, manifold. We can only imagine how skewed our understanding of Song of the Lark would be had critics judged the work based on their own anxious participation in opera. Nevertheless, critics have liked to rehearse Hemingway's famous yet spurious remark that Cather had filched her battle scenes from D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.⁶ In fact, no clear line of influence exists between the two works, and we know that a New York Times account of her cousin's death, among other sources, gave shape to Claude's death.⁷ Far from offering thoughtful appraisal, Hemingway and his compatriots were intent on guarding male territory.

Cather certainly had a response to such criticism. Citing the example of Stephen Crane, whose novel of war did not derive from his experience in combat, Cather said, "He knew that the movement of troops was the officers' business, not his."⁸ Taking his cue from Cather, Woodress offers a more complete correction: "Critics who objected to a war novel by someone who had no experience of war did not make the connection between One of Ours and authors like Homer, Tolstoy, and Stephen Crane, all of whom managed very good accounts of war without having been soldiers in the conflicts they described."⁹ In fact, as Trout points out, the novel's avid fans "included army veterans who apparently possessed more firsthand knowledge of modern warfare than any of Cather's critics, including Hemingway."¹⁰ In this way, Cather's bona fides were defended, but the scope of her endeavor was radically curtailed: One of Ours remained for many people, quite simply, a "war novel."

In 1975, David Stouck held fast to this frame, arguing that "The author's stylistic intention was not to describe the war in a realistic manner, but to reflect the romantic aura that for so many men gathered around the experience."¹¹ Jean Schwind extended this line of argument: "Far from extolling Claude's 'fulfillment' on the battlefield, Cather insists that Claude dies doubly duped."¹² In the same spirit, Merrill Maguire Skaggs saw a war novel "bathed and saturated in irony."¹³ Calling the book "a painful and unsatisfactory book," Hermione Lee offered a summation: "We are left with a conscientious but not always convincing attempt to dignify the war into historical...